Last month the Government announced a planned taskforce to assess the impact of regional bank branch closures on local businesses and industries. Late yesterday, Treasury released an issues paper outlining the focus of the taskforce and the questions it hopes to answer.

According to the terms of reference in the issues paper, the taskforce will analyse and assess:

the trends in bank branch closures in regional and remote Australia; the impacts of these branch closures on individuals, businesses, community organisations and regional industries (including business and land values) and determine accessibility issues and wider impacts on communities from these branch closures for banking facilities, services and products; how banks transition their services and delivery models to communities where they have closed (or will close) branches; alternatives to bank branch models that would maintain or improve banking services and accessibility in areas where branches have been closed and potential solutions to overcome accessibility issues where branches have closed.

By way of context, the paper cited a few statistics, including:

the fall in the number of branches in regional and remote Australia (down from 2,500 to 1,900 in the four years to June 2021, with a 5 per cent decline in branches in the past year); the more modest decline in other bank face-to-face points of presence in regional and remote Australia (down from around 2,500 to 2,400 in the past four years, with Bank@Post numbers steady at around 1,900); the drop in the number of ATMs (the total number of active ATMs nationally has fallen by around 20 per cent since its peak in late 2016).

"The effects of these declines may be particularly felt in regional communities, where closures can affect the liveability of towns, especially for residents who are unable to use online services to do their banking," the paper noted.

These changes come at a time when the NBN rollout has allowed a clear majority of regional Australian banking customers to access online and mobile banking services as readily as their metropolitan peers. 

Nevertheless, under the ABA’s Banking Code of Practice, member banks are committed to providing personal and small business customers in remote, rural and regional areas with ongoing face-to-face banking services when branches close. 

The issues paper laid out several potential alternatives to banking at branches, such as:

•    use of digital technology, starting with telephone calls, the internet and mobile apps, live chat services and video conferencing consultations; 

•    Bank@Post, which involves post offices acting as an agent and providing services to customers of over 80 banks and other financial institutions;

•    ATMs, which despite a significant decline in numbers amid a decline in the use of cash for payments, still provide access to cash (as around 95 per cent of people lived within about 5 km of a cash access point in 2020, broadly unchanged from 2017);   

•    mobile bankers, who can visit individual customers in their homes or places of business, which may be cost-effective in regional or remote areas where bank branches are unavailable or some distance away; and

•    banks branches continuing to