National Bank to shut NAB branches in regional Australia

NAB are set to shut three more banks in regional Victoria in coming months, citing more customers moving to online banking.

Several National Bank branches across regional Australia are set to shut in the coming months in the latest round of rural closures.

Whittlesea’s longstanding NAB branch will close this week for the final time, with the Emerald NAB branch closing on March 7 and the Bright NAB branch wrapping up operations on April 18.

Four other regional Victorian towns have lost branches this financial year with Kilmore, Morwell, Ocean Grove and Tatura losing their NAB services in late 2023.

It represents the latest round of NAB rural cutbacks, which ramped up in 2019 before a public backlash resulted in management enforcing a closure moratorium.

In 2021, the moratorium was quietly lifted with several more branches shutting including Cobden’s sole bank branch in southwest Victoria.

NAB retail executive Krissie Jones said more and more Australians were choosing to bank digitally, leading to the branch closures.

“Our customers now have banking technology at their fingertips, through their device and more than 93 per cent of customer transactions now take place online,” Ms Jones said.

“We acknowledge that big change is not always easy and reshaping our branch network sometimes requires difficult decisions.

“These decisions are made with the community and our customers in mind while also taking into account a broad range of factors like the number of customers using our branches, our ability to staff our branches and how we ensure a consistent level of customer service.”

Independent researcher Dale Webster has been monitoring bank branch closures for several years and has compiled a database on The Regional website.

She said following political pressure banks were now compelled to publish “fact sheets” on their websites advising of branch closures but the information was cleverly hidden.

“The National Bank have been using incomplete visitation data to justify their decisions,” Ms Webster said.

“They narrow the time in which people can access their bank, so regular hours are cut in half and then they count only electronic transactions, not in-person visitation numbers.

“They then publish these figures on so-called fact sheets, or non-fact sheets as I like to call them, because they’re not worth the paper they’re written on.”

Three of the big four banks — National, Commonwealth and Westpac — have signed up to the Bank@Post initiative, which provides a number of banking services through post offices.

ANZ Bank has been the only non-participant of the Big Four, with former Australia Post boss Christine Holgate calling on ANZ to sign up.

NAB’s Ms Jones said: “Where we make the difficult decision to close a branch in a regional location, we will ensure our customers have access to Bank@Post through our 10-year partnership with Australia Post so they can choose to bank in person.”