Economy Regional Japanese banks face pressure, cut branch hours

thomas · 6 Oct 2024

I'm sure that the trend described below will gradually affect many other industries across Japan:

Regional banks face tough times due to low interest rates and declining customer numbers. Many have closed branches to cut costs, but they're trying to keep some open by staggering their operations. This means these branches will only be open every other day. While this helps keep banking services available in rural areas, how long it can be sustained with rising maintenance costs and fewer customers is unclear.

Nanto Bank's central branch in Nara

Based in Nara Prefecture, Nanto Bank started every-other-day operations for two sets of two branches in the spring of 2020. One branch of each pair is open on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, while the other is open on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Ten people used to work at the Yoshinoguchi and Wakigami branches, but the number was slashed in half. The five remaining staff members now work at both branches. "I was worried about whether the procedures would go smoothly," the business owner who visited the Yoshinoguchi branch said. "But there were no problems because the same clerks work at both branches."

Struggling regional banks stagger branch operations | The Asahi Shimbun: Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis

dracuella · 8 Oct 2024

How are things in the rest of Europe and in the US - is this not a somewhat world-wide phenomenon? For the last three decades banks here in Denmark have closed branches all over as everyone has switched to online banking and only the elderly tend to actually visit banks nowadays.
I did a quick search for some statistics and found these for Denmark. The overall number of branches has decreased quite significantly while the number of employees has only decreased with about a third.
So in from 1993 to 2023, in a 30 year span:

the number of different banks went from 219 to 52
the number of branches went from 2,652 to 684
the number of employees went from 51,014 to 36,087

(source: Institutter, filialer & ansatte).

Economy Regional Japanese banks face pressure, cut branch hours

thomas

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dracuella

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