The great bank meltdown is making many lives a misery

For those of us who use that cash dispenser, it has felt like a gauntlet to be run, knowing café customers could be watching as the machine spilled wads of dosh into our hands. This, however, is what happens when local bank branches close.

When I first arrived in the area, where now we were scoffing scones was the Royal Bank of Scotland’s premises. For a long time after closing it stood empty until a café and milliner’s moved in. Sadly, neither of those businesses has prospered, and our days of watching Melrosians emptying their accounts while we sip cappuccinos are over.

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The Royal Bank was the last to pull out of town, meaning that today there is not a single bank left. The nearest is in Galashiels, four miles away. That might not sound far, but for those without a car it is a schlep. If, like me, you have an account with Barclays, you have to travel either to Edinburgh (a three-hour round trip) or Berwick upon Tweed (two and a half hours) to enjoy speaking to a human being. You might call this one of the drawbacks of living in the sticks. I prefer to think of it as a disgraceful abnegation of responsibility on the part of institutions whose profits are made from their customers.

According to figures from the consumer rights group Which?, in the past seven years the top five banks in Britain have closed 57% of their branches. Since 2015, HSBC, Lloyds, Barclays, NatWest and Santander have overseen the demise of 4,294 branches, and there are many more in the pipeline.

Meanwhile other mainstays of the Scottish high street – Royal Bank of Scotland and Bank of Scotland in particular – have closed dozens of doors. A list from the Bank of Scotland of recent closures – in places such as Selkirk, Forres, Troon and Dunblane – includes documents showing the reasons for doing so. As if that makes it any better for those left high and dry.

Bankers frequently say that customers have told them they prefer to bank online, but I’d like to see the evidence for that. While the majority of us now do some or all of our banking this way, it’s because we have little choice. Asked if I would rather be able to transfer large (to me) sums of money or make a substantial payment in person rather than digitally, I’d far rather have the comfort of a professional doing it for me. When redirecting anything with three or more zeros online, I hit the key with a sense of dread, knowing I’m quite capable of making a terrible mistake.

Of course there are lots of daily banking tasks that can be effortlessly done digitally. Nevertheless, with the disappearance of banks from countless small towns, there is a creeping sense of abandonment, and the suspicion that the ability fully to control your finances depends on where you live. As a result, there is a generation approaching or beyond retirement age that is left feeling both disgruntled and side-lined, aware that, in bean counters’ eyes, their needs are irrelevant.

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Recognising that the new way of doing business can leave the digitally-challenged all at sea without a life jacket, HSBC is supplying some customers with tablets and giving individual tuition to help them “migrate to digital banking”. This makes them sound more like wildebeest than valued clients, whose money lies in the vaults of the very places cutting them adrift. It is also rather missing the point.

Nobody can deny that we live in a world where access to the internet, and the skill to navigate it, will soon be essential for conducting our affairs. But with something as serious as money – and the less you have of it the more important it becomes – being able to speak directly to someone, in person, is paramount. No matter how efficient or friendly staff are at the end of a phone, they cannot replace the reassurance of talking to an expert face to face.

Bad enough the alienating and alarming effect the great bank meltdown is having on customers. What about the impact on the high street where now, instead of being a fixture as necessary as the baker’s or newsagents, there is, instead, a void?

The need to revitalise town centres is one of the great challenges of our times, but with a diminishing number of essential services offered there, what hope is there for regeneration? Banks have gone the same way as the Post Office: once a given, now – if you’re lucky – to be found tucked at the back of a budget store or chemist. When, on a recent visit to an Edinburgh mall, I spied a large Post Office, I was almost as thrilled as if I’d spotted George Clooney. Does that say more about me, or the state of society?

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Digital natives will doubtless find such worries inexplicable, if not laughable. Looking around my friends, family and neighbours, however, I am far from alone. Living longer, as we all hope to do, means there will be millions of us, who were raised to rely upon a guiding hand with our finances, facing years of increasingly anxious or frustrating management of our accounts. I predict a boom in Power of Attorney agreements, if only so that a youngster can help an ageing relative with online banking.

What makes the vanishing acts of these enormously wealthy global institutions particularly irksome is that when it comes to money, we have no alternative but to put it into their hands. They seem more than happy to take it, yet they are not prepared to commit to a nationwide presence that would give customers peace of mind. As bank statements go, that’s pretty clear: it puts them morally in the red.