‘End of the cashier’ as banking app web chats catch on

THE end of the high-street cashier may be drawing near as millions of Britons turn to online web chats for advice on their finances, a report has found.

Last year 4.4 million web chats were hosted on UK banking apps or websites, up 24 per cent on 2015, as the popularity of smartphone technology continued to surge.

With banking apps becoming more sophisticated, the number of people conducting some or all of their financial transactions online also rose to 19.6 million, up by nearly 10 per cent.

Published today by the British Bankers’ Association (BBA), the report found that customers are increasingly using their smartphones as “portable banks” – able to manage credit cards, mortgages, pay in cheques and take part in live video exchanges with bank staff.

It adds that the number of financial transactions conducted on apps surged by 57 per cent in 2016, to 932 million, while a total of 4.9 billion app logins were recorded, also up by more than a third compared with the previous year. Meanwhile, 434 million text alerts were sent to customers to help them track their spending during the same period, equivalent to 14 texts every second. In total, banking app activity has soared by more than 350 per cent since 2012.

The figures come less than a month after it was revealed that more than 461 branches will close this year across Britain, as traditional banks restructure in order to compete online. While high-street branches remain on the slide, new online-only challenger banks are growing rapidly, with Atom Bank, available only through an app, raising more than £100million in the first quarter of 2017.

Peter Neufeld, a partner and head of customer experience at Ernst and Young, said that the growing demand for digital banking was “driving” banks to become more innovative. “More and more consumers are seeing their app as their primary banking experience,” he continued. “I think in future more and more activities that take place in a branch are going to take place on mobile devices. It will result in a change in what happens inside of actual branches.

“You can definitely see a lot of the banks looking to reduce the size of their estate overall, but you might also see examples of where the nature of what happens inside of banks changes. While we may see fewer cashiers and less cash-handling, new types of services could be created that drive more human experience. That could include services for small business owners in the community, and more complex financial arrangements.”

However, Mr Neufeld added that an end to the high-street branch seemed unlikely because customers still prefer to “interact with other human beings when it comes to home-buying, retirement planning or a significant lending activity.”