Don’t bank on more branches

ALTHOUGH Kensington High Street in London is a popular destination for tourists, it is not without its struggles. Retailers come and go all the time, more so now than ten years ago.

The road, thankfully, still has its fair share of banks and cash machines, which cannot be said of all high streets up and down the country.

Most of the banks appear busy whenever I stroll past at lunchtime although I have still yet to quite fathom out what goes on inside Studio B, a digital-focused branch owned by CYBG, owner of Virgin Money.

Precious little from what I have witnessed so far. Does anyone out there know – staff or customers?

Santander’s branch, all machines, is also about as welcoming as an invitation to a morgue while Lloyds houses its cashiers upstairs rather than on ground level.

It is as if the bank doesn’t want you to know they are there. ‘Use the machines please.’ The same goes for HSBC. Upstairs, staff. Downstairs, machines. Automation here we come.

Yet even moneyed Kensington High Street is now beginning to lose its banks. Royal Bank of Scotland has just shut up shop, showing its contempt for the high street by ripping out the two cash machines in the branch’s frontage and covering the holes with white plasterboard.

I am sure many of Kensington’s well-heeled residents will be singularly unimpressed with the horrible scars the bank has left behind. Contemptible behaviour from a bank we helped save from ruin a decade ago – and that last Friday said it doubled profits in 2018 to £1.6 billion.

RBS may be the first to walk away, but for sure it won’t be the last. Unless Studio B is transformed into a Virgin Money branch, its days must surely be numbered.

Painful though it is to see bank branches close, I don’t really have a problem with RBS deserting Kensington.

Indeed, I would rather see fewer banks on Kensington High Street if it meant there were more (or just one) in towns where all the banks have long run for the hills.

In recent weeks I have visited two towns whose banking fortunes have gone in opposite directions.

In Ambleside, Cumbria, there is no longer a bank on the high street despite the fact that the town is the busy gateway to the South Lakes and is always heaving with tourists.

Many local businesses are cashbased and need a bank to deposit their takings. Ambleside has become a banking wasteland. This is illogical, is wrong on all levels and it should never have been allowed to happen.

By way of contrast, Wokingham, a thriving Berkshire town dealing with a raft of new housing and a major shopping development on the way, is currently awash with banks – even though some branches are not particularly proud of how they present themselves to the public (NatWest’s signage last weekend lit up as NatWes).

Like Kensington High Street, Wokingham seems overbanked. Last week, in a parliamentary debate on Santander’s decision to close 140 branches this year (Kensington is not on the hit list), Conservative MP Paul Scully said he supported the creation of ‘banking hubs’ – where all the big banks come together to provide banking facilities under one roof. This idea is not a new one. Far from it. For years, The Mail on Sunday waved the flag for newstyle community banks (banking hubs) that would ensure no town would be left without a banking presence.

The Campaign for Community Banking Services, run by former NatWest banker Derek French, tirelessly promoted the project.

But it was stonewalled at every turn – by the banks and successive Governments who preferred instead to bolster the Post Office’s high street presence so it could accommodate the needs of people not keen on banking online.

The campaign has now died a death while French has decided retirement, slippers and cocoa are preferable to banging his head up against a proverbial brick wall.

Scully is right to support community banks, but I fear he will end up merely chasing shadows. As French did.

The idea for new community banks is nothing new...but it was stonewalled