The combined effect of conjunctural factors (the adjustment of the bubble excesses real estate and finance and negative official rates depressing income) and structural change (the growing digitization of the economy and society) has led to the spanish banking to make a unprecedented cutback in your network workshops in the last 14 years, only surpassed in Europe by that of the Netherlands. Between the peak of September 2008 and the end of last year, credit institutions reduced their branches in Spain and 58.5%until 19.104its lowest level since September 1976. Seen in another way, they have closed the 27.014 localeswhich is as if all the offices they had open in March 2018 had disappeared.
All of this has also resulted in an unparalleled cut in the number of employees. Between 2008 and 2020 (the last year with official data from the Bank of Spain), the sector has destroyed 98,790 jobs in the country, bringing its workforce down to 179,511 people, the 35.4% less and the lowest level since the supervisor began measuring it in 1981. In 2021, moreover, the adjustment accelerated as a result of the mergers and the economic crisis caused by the pandemic. Top 10 banks cut another 12,515 jobsup to 144,836, with which the total adjustment of the sector is already close to 40% since 2008.
Catalonia It has been the autonomous community that has suffered a greater cut in offices since 2008 (71%) as a result of the debacle of most of its ‘caixes’. Somewhat behind, but also above the average, the closures were located in the Valencian Community (64%), the de Madrid (62%), Murcia (60%) y Galicia (58.9%). At the opposite extreme were those of Navarra (42%), Estremadura (38%) y Castilla la Mancha (37%) due to its lower relative growth of branches in the years of the bubble. For the same reason, the fit was greater in the largest municipalities (around 56% in those with more than 50,000 inhabitants) than in smaller ones (around 40% for those with less than 5,000 inhabitants).
ongoing process
The network cut, in addition, is far from having touched ground. The Big Ten Banks Closed other 531 offices (which raise the adjustment from 2008 to 59.7%) only in the first trimester of 2022, mainly due to closures driven by CaixaBank and Unicaja after the absorption of Bankia and Liberbank, respectively. The costs of the entities are more adjusted after years of cuts and revenues are increasing thanks to rate hikes, improving efficiency and profitability. But the unstoppable spread of the use of mobile and digital banking draws a panorama in which the sector will have fewer and fewer branches.
In fact, Spain continues to present a ratio of offices per inhabitant much higher than those of other developed countries, despite the reduction in recent years. Between 2008 and 2020 (last date with comparable data), it has gone from about 100 branches for every 100,000 citizens to 45,5but it is still slightly more than twice the average of the European Union (22.6) and also much higher than the data of United States (29.6). This could indicate that the sector still has room to converge towards the global standard, but it must also be taken into account that the country has a population dispersion much higher, as shown by the number of employees by branch is lower than the Community average.
Precisely, the financial exclusion What has caused this process, especially in rural areas, is one of its most criticized aspects. As EL PERIÓDICO anticipated, the Ministry of Economy and employers Work has begun to develop a new package of measures to improve the situation of Spain emptied, which some sources suggest could be presented before August. The main objective is to bring basic banking services, especially the possibility of obtaining cash, to the 1.4% of the population who reside in rural municipalities that do not have a bank branch or other types of physical access routes to the financial system, such as ATMs or those known as ‘ofibuses’.
665,000 excluded
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The percentage of unattended population is low, but it implies that close to 665,000 Spaniards are affected by the highest degree of financial exclusion, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics for the end of 2021. In addition, a 3.3% of the population -1.56 million people- reside in towns no bank branch, although with some other of the mechanisms deployed by the financial sector to provide physical access to its most basic services. Both data, to which this newspaper has had access, come from a report that the bosses AEB and CECA (banks and old savings banks, respectively) plan to publish in the coming days.
The most affected provinces are Burgos (313 municipalities without branches in 2020, according to the latest data from the Bank of Spain) and Salamanca (307), ahead of Guadalajara (247), Avila (215) y Zamora (203). Valladolid, Segovia, Palencia, Cuenca, Zaragoza and Soria have between 180 and 150 affected towns, while León, Navarra, Teruel, Cáceres, Lleida, GironaLa Rioja, Huesca, Barcelona, Tarragona and Valencia add between 150 and 100. At the opposite extreme, Córdoba, Seville, Lugo, Murcia, the Balearic Islands, Cádiz, Pontevedra, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Las Palmas and Jaén have less than 10 municipalities without offices.