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Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

>Banking apps closed 99% of high street banks (here in the UK at least).

I don't believe this is true. High street banks are still common. 99% closed means we previously had 100 times as many, which would be absurdly high. It's probably closer to 50% closed.

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In my town they ALL closed. We previously had 6; we now have a community centre where two different banks operate personal banking consultations for one workday a week each, but they only do appointments, they don’t handle cash or do any banking.

If I want to visit a branch I need to go to the next city.

Could this also be the result of the shrinking population and not necessarily due to mechanization alone?

No, the town’s population has grown in recent years. Lots of house building.

When I went to a bank recently, I discovered my local high street "bank" branch is now mostly just internet kiosks with an under-trained and probably underpaid assistant there between the handful of kiosks to help people log on to it.

It is nothing like the experience of growing up in the early 90's and what banks were then.

Consider that everyone did their banking in person and people dealt with a lot of cheques. Oh, and banks didn't tend to open at weekends, you had to find time during the week.

There was a need for a lot of tellers, and banks were incredibly busy places.

"99% closed" is obviously hyperbole, especially counting by branch, but if you were to count by tellers or by people visiting their bank, I could well believe it.

Not just a matter of binary open/closed, though. In some countries now, in branches that remain open have slashed staff, leading to very long waiting times or the need to book an appointment in advance. Very different physical-location landscape than 15 years ago.

Can't speak to the UK experience but in Australia, the nature of in-branch assistance has changed but IMO for the better. No more standing in line waiting for Nanna to get her pension out. I book an appointment online, rock up, get my limit raised or whatever, bam done.

Here's a recent article from the FT [1] (paywalled):

> Across the country, there are now barely 4,000 bank and building society branches, down 80 per cent in 40 years.

So, a big decline, but still 20x as many high street banks than what a 99% decline claims.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/10ce1086-a9ae-4851-92e4-3b6efc8a0...

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