ANZ boss reveals why almost 300 branches have shut down

The ANZ Bank has closed 287 branches across Australia in the last six years and now its CEO has revealed the real reason why.

Customers often “bemoan” and complain about the closure of bank branches across Australia but rarely use them even when they are open.

ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott made the claim today at a hearing of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics.

Across Australia, the ANZ Bank has closed 287 branches in the last six years.

Grilled on the decision-making processes today, Mr Elliott defended the practice at the parliamentary committee as simply reflecting customer behaviour.

“I don’t mean to diminish the feedback, but a lot of people bemoan the fact that branches are closing but they don’t actually use them,’’ he said.

“And even when we do provide alternative solutions the usage is extraordinarily low because people actually do like the convenience of being able to do things digitally.”

Mr Elliott said experiments in New Zealand, where multiple banks shared shopfront premises “to be honest ... hasn’t gone so well”.

“I mean, clearly we’re running a business here and we want to be interacting with our customers as much as possible,’’ he said.

CEO Shayne Elliott said customers were upset by closures but didn’t use branches when they were open. Picture: Arsineh Houspian

“The more engaged they are with us the better from our perspective, the more loyal they’re going to be, so we have a vested interest in being able to service customers in the way that they want.

“(But) it’s something like 90-96 per cent of all our transactions today with our customers are done digitally, either, you know at home on a desktop or on a mobile phone.”

Mr Elliott said that it was a very small number of customers who did not use digital banking options.

“Only 8 per cent of our customers only use a branch and don’t have any sort of digital relationship with that,’’ he said.

“So it’s about 8 per cent of our customer base are, you know, loyal branch users.”

“As a baseline, we had 678 branches today. As of a week ago 391 branches,’’ Mr Elliott said.

“So we’ve been closing branches pretty steadily through that although to be fair, the data about the closures were more concentrated in the early part of that period than the latter.

“The rate of closure is actually slowing, if that makes sense.

The ANZ Bank has closed 287 branches in the last six years. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Damian Shaw

“If you look at the distribution of the 391 branches we have today 250 of them are in what we would find as major cities. Most of the closures actually happened in the major cities and again, it’s you know, your classic Colin street where we would have had five branches in the past now we have three.

“There’s been essentially no closures in remote or very remote Australia and you know, regional somewhere in the middle. It’s responding to what customers are doing.”

Mr Elliott’s evidence follows claims people are being forced to drive up to $200,000 in cash thousands of kilometres as bank branches close in regional area.

According to the Finance Sector Union, bank branch closures are reaching “crisis point” with the big four closing more than 550 bank branches across Australia since January 2020.

The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority said 575 regional banks closed between mid-2017 and mid-2021.

Originally published as ANZ boss reveals why almost 300 branches have shut down