Yahoo Finance ANZ boss slams Aussies ‘bemoaning’ branch closures: ‘They don’t use them’
ANZ has permanently closed 287 branches in the past six years.
CEO of ANZ bank Shayne Elliot has called out customers who complain about branch closures.
Elliott said lots of customers had complained about the bank's 287 branch closures in the past six years, but criticised them for not actually using them.
“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,’’ Elliott said at a hearing of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics on Wednesday.
“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.”
Also read: ANZ slammed over branch closures: ‘Clearly don’t care’
Also read: ANZ to shut more regional branches: ‘Death knell’
Aussies moving away from physical branches
Elliott said the ongoing customer trend was moving more towards the digital, and that branch closures were simply representative of that.
“Clearly, we’re running a business here and we want to be interacting with our customers as much as possible,’’ he said.
“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, at home on a desktop or on a mobile phone.”
Elliott said only around 8 per cent of ANZ customers actually used in-branch services and did not use any digital banking options.
“So, it’s about 8 per cent of our customer base are loyal branch users. 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 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 regional somewhere in the middle. It’s responding to what customers are doing.”
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