Some of the best business bank accounts in the UK are continuing to close many of their branches despite the heavy toll doing so will take on communities already struggling due to the global economic recession.
High Street banking giant HSBC has been aggressively shuttering a high number of branches, with 44 already shuttered. The banking provider plans to close the doors on an additional eight by March of next year.
Both Halifax and Nationwide have taken the ax to their entire agency networks, which were specifically designed to provide financial services to solicitors, estate agents, and other third-party entities.
Halifax brand owner Lloyds has decided to follow in HSBC’s footsteps by beginning to turn the lights off at several bank branches of its own.
Small communities are set to be hit the hardest from the Lloyds shutdown. One such town is Potton, in Bedfordshire, where the Lloyds TSB branch in its market square will showcase a merrily lit Christmas tree for the last time before it is shuttered for good this coming February.
Being closed because it has not been generating enough profit, the branch will leave the town of 5,500 residents bereft after a successfully hard-fought campaign to keep it open when it had been slated for shuttering just 12 years ago.
The Potton branch of Lloyds TSB has been present for nine decades in the thriving market town, which now has to cope without having a banking provider. The decision to pull the plug on the branch has been devastated by the news.
51 year old Kassy Lean, Potton Vineyard Church group volunteer, stated that all the community’s hard work to keep the bank open for so many years has been wiped away in a flash.
Ms Lean, who aids in excess of 30 vulnerable and elderly people by providing them with lifts to hospital and assisting at coffee mornings, is especially concerned with how they will continue to do their banking with the branch gone from Potton. She was especially critical of Lloyds TSB’s decision to abandon its loyal customers who helped the bank survive the worldwide banking crisis, especially in light of how Lloyds is 41 per cent taxpayer owned.