Many years ago, former finance minister Hannes Androsch said that Austria was “overbanked” and had too many banks. As for the branches, he was obviously right.
As the largest bank, the number of closed branches at Raiffeisen Oberösterreich is the highest in absolute terms. In the past ten years, 45 branches have been closed and merged with others, and now up to 60 more are being added. This means that Raiffeisen will still have more branches in the federal state than all the others combined.
The second largest chain store is Sparkasse Oberösterreich. In 2012 it had 139 branches, and 23 branches were added in 2013 as a result of the merger with Sparkasse Kirchdorf. “That remained unchanged until 2019. Then we started to merge branches,” says CEO Herbert Walzhofer. The Sparkasse currently has 146 locations, 30 of which are purely self-service points. It is planned to reduce to 137 locations (34 of which are SB) in the foreseeable future. Larger branches are to be expanded for this purpose. When does a branch become uneconomical? “There is a guideline. According to this, a branch with fewer than 2,000 customers is hardly worth it,” says Walzhofer.
The Oberbank has increased the number of its branches in recent years, but only outside of Upper Austria, especially in Vienna and abroad, where it is expanding towards northern Germany. In Upper Austria, the number of branches has fallen from 59 to 46 over the past ten years.
The Volksbank Oberösterreich has made a drastic reduction. With the start of the merger of the regional Volksbanks to form the Volksbank Oberösterreich in 2015, it still had 50 branches, but this number has now been reduced to 23. This was also the result of a massive savings program as part of the restructuring.
VKB-Bank has closed four branches in the past ten years, and six more are to follow this year (or are already closed). That makes 28 branches.
At Hypo Oberösterreich, the number of branches in Upper Austria has fallen from 15 to ten within ten years.
Source: Nachrichten
