West Coast Council Mayor Shane Pitt said his community will be faced with a nightmare to access cash if Bendigo Bank goes ahead with its plan this week. (Source: Google/Supplied)
A handful of Bendigo Bank branches are due to close this week, and the move will leave Australians with a new nightmare reality to get cash and complete other essential banking needs. The bank has earmarked 10 locations for permanent closure and noted that it was a “difficult decision” to make.
Queenstown on Tasmania’s west coast is one of those locations, and residents will be forced into a four-hour round trip to access the next closest branch in Burnie, which is 150 kilometres away. West Coast Council mayor Shane Pitt told Yahoo Finance it will devastate the local community.
“We’ve got a lot of elderly people in our community that rely on that face-to-face banking to assist with their finances, so it’s certainly going to be an issue,” he said.
He added that many people in his community don’t have cars or driver’s licenses, and instead rely on public transport to get around.
A one-way bus trip to Burnie from Queenstown can take up to four hours, meaning the trip to the nearest Bendigo Bank branch will likely take a whole day.
Bendigo Bank is the last bank in Queenstown, which has a population of 1,808, and there’s only one non-bank-owned ATM, but that carries fees for cash withdrawals.
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While people will still be able to get cash through places like Australia Post and the supermarkets, Pitt said it’s a slap in the face to people who rely on physical bank branches.
“They don’t care about the people. They call themselves a community bank, but I’m afraid Bendigo Bank is no longer a community bank.
“It’s disappointing that these things happen.
“We’d like to see a lot more people moving into our community. But if they can’t sit down with a bank manager and talk through a bank home loan or something like that, well, we’re not going to get these people coming.”
He’s hoping for an 11th-hour U-turn by the bank this week before the September 26 closure.
Two branches in Queensland and one branch in Victoria will also close on the same day, with the other six closing between the start of August and the end of October.
A Bendigo Bank spokesperson told Yahoo Finance that its decision to shutter 10 branches across Australia was due to:
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The bank’s CEO and managing director, Richard Fennell, said this course of action is always a last resort.
“Bendigo Bank has more branches per customer than any other Australian bank. We operate the second largest regional branch network and the third largest branch network nationally,” he said.
“To preserve what makes our Bank unique, we must balance our physical network presence with the need to continue investing in the changing preferences of our 2.7 million customers.”
Here are the other locations that will be closed:
Victoria
South Melbourne, August 1
Malop St Geelong, August 1
Bannockburn, September 25
Yarram, September 26
Korumburra, August 29
Ballarat Central, October 31
Queensland
Tasmania
Kings Meadows, August 1
Queenstown, September 26
Many banks across the country have ripped out their ATMs and reduced their branch location numbers as Aussies use their services less.
Canstar research released last year found a whopping 230 bank branches were closed over the 2023-24 financial year, while the death toll for ATMs over the last half-decade stands at more than 6,000.
Of that 230, 52 were located in a regional area. The year before, 112 were shut.
Over a five-year period, 1,615 have shut their doors.
The small town of Queenstown will see their final bank branch leave this week unless Bendigo Bank reverses its decision. (Source: Queenstown)
“Bank branches are continuing to disappear as banking and payments increasingly go digital,” Canstar Data Insights Director Sally Tindall said.
“Cash might not rule the roost any more, but there’s still plenty of Australians that rely on it as a way to pay for things.”
The Big Four have signed a moratorium to not close any more regional branches until 2027, but there are big questions about what will happen after that deadline.
The federal government inquiry into this issue laid out eight recommendations last year, one of which was setting up a regional community banking branch program to help underwrite the establishment of community bank branches.
It also suggested guaranteeing reasonable access to cash and financial services for all Aussies, and establishing a mandatory code of conduct that would force banks to have meaningful consultation with communities before a branch is closed.
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