The biggest bank in the US says its branches are going to get smaller.
JP Morgan Chase, the largest bank in the US by assets, showed shareholders today how its branches are going to look in the future. The short version? They’ll have fewer tellers and other staff and they will occupy around 20%-40% less space.
Tellers should be nervous. The bank says that it expects to cut overall staff at its retail branches by about 20% by 2015. (It expects to shrink the number of tellers by 50%.)
Here’s a rendering of how the branches might look, taken from the bank’s presentation, which came as part of its investor’s day.
JP Morgan’s moves to change the look and feel of its bank branches come even as the industry seems inclined to axe the number of branches outright.
Some of the biggest US banks, including Bank of America, have been rethinking how they interact with retail customers. And in many cases they’ve decided to shrink their expansive branch networks. The number of US bank branches is down 3% since 2009, according to June 2013 data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
However, JP Morgan is taking a slightly different approach. The bank is betting that cutting the size of bank branches, but boosting their numbers, will enable it to capture deposits from rival banks. And according to the chart below, it may be working.
