In many ways, it’s the never-ending troubles of Metro that cast the greatest shadow over traditional banking. Boss Daniel Frumkin insists it remains “committed to stores and the high street” following a £925m rescue led by Colombian billionaire Jaime Gilinski Bacal but in the same breath he says the company “will transition to a more cost-efficient business model”.
For the time being there are no plans to close any of the big shiny stores it shot to prominence on the back of but a decision to cut a fifth of roughly 4,000 jobs as well as review its seven-day opening strategy is hardly a vote of confidence in the “community bank” approach that was meant to be its differentiating factor.
Metro says it stands by a pledge to open new branches in the North of England over the coming years but it will be of no surprise at all if the proposal is quietly shelved at some point.
It’s not just the rapid decline of branch numbers that is killing any premise of customer service that was left. It’s the whole obsession with automation, something that stretches to almost every walk of life these days.
But it’s particularly prevalent in banking, whether it’s apps that are seemingly forever down “due to important maintenance”, pointless chatbots bombarding you the second you log on or even robo-advisers that fail to deliver market-beating returns.
The worst part about it all is that it is nothing more than a cynical cost-cutting ploy from an industry that appears to regard customers as little more than an after-thought.
We’re told that this all represents progress. Try telling that to the elderly person faced with a two-hour round trip to withdraw their state pension.
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