The branches of banks and savings banks are disappearing more and more from the streets in Germany. What is the reason for that?
Banks and savings banks continued to thin out their branch network in Germany last year. Reasons are the increasing online banking of customers as well as mergers, especially among the cooperative banks. The number of branches of all providers decreased compared to the previous year by 1266 locations or 5.8 percent, as announced by the Bundesbank on Friday in Frankfurt.
At the end of last year, 20,446 branches with employees remained. The speed of branch deaths has thus slowed somewhat after a loss of almost ten percent of all branches in 2021, which was also favored by the corona pandemic. Pure machine locations are not taken into account in the statistics.
Furthermore, the savings banks and state banks operate most of the branches. They reduced their offer by 441 to 7470 locations. This is followed by the cooperative Volksbanks and Raiffeisenbanks with 6894 branches. The big banks reduced their network by 7.9 percent to 3,719 locations and thus still cover 18.2 percent of the entire offer. The other branches are maintained by regional banks and building societies, among others.
The Bundesbank has registered 1,458 credit institutions for 2022. That was 61 fewer than a year earlier, with 55 mergers of cooperative institutes contributing in particular. Seven credit institutions returned their banking licenses and four financial institutions had their licenses revoked.
Source: Stern
