Post Office extends banking partnership with NatWest and RBS
Post Office Ltd is extending its role as a branch consolidator on Britain’s flagging High Street, with an agreement to provide more counter services for two big banks. NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) will allow personal and business customers to make deposits or pay in cheques at any of the Post Office’s 11,780 branches from later this year.
The move extends an arrangement that already allows customers to withdraw funds and check their NatWest/RBS account balances in post offices.
NatWest and RBS are both part of the Edinburgh-based RBS Group, one of the largest banks in the world before the 2008 recession, after which a major bailout saw the company majority-owned by the UK government. The Group has about 17m customers in the UK.
For Post Office Ltd, the deal with RBS Group should encourage more footfall in post offices. The network as a whole serves just under 20m customers a week, with 93% of the UK population living within a mile of a post office. However, footfall in post offices has fallen by 28% over the last decade with the withdrawal of some government services and the digitisation of communications.
The UK’s network of post offices, 11,407 of which are run by franchisees or agency partners, is larger than branch networks of all UK banks and building societies combined, four times the size of the supermarket chain Tesco and has seven times more outlets than the UK’s largest bank, Barclays.
The post office network already offers banking services for customers of 22 banks, including Barclays, First Direct, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, Santander and TSB, with customers withdrawing £1m a day from their bank accounts via post offices.
The network already carries out about 11.5m transactions each year for NatWest and RBS customers, including balance enquiries and £50m worth of cash withdrawals.
Nick Kennett, the direct of Post Office Financial Services, said his company was pleased to be extending services available to RBS and NatWest personal and business customers.
“With over 11,500 branches and longer opening hours we are making it easier for customers to conduct banking transactions at the same time as other service in their local Post Office.”
Choice
RBS Group said together with Post Office outlets, its branches and ATMs will mean customers now have 22,500 locations where they can carry out their banking.
Les Matheson, the UK Retail CEO for RBS Group, said providing more services through post offices would give his company’s customers more choice in how they do their banking.
“Our customers are changing the way they bank with us. They want to be able to do their everyday banking in a variety of different ways – where and when it is convenient for them,” he said.
Last week economic and financial think tank CentreForum issued a report recommending that more local authorities in the UK should provide their services via post offices.
Post Office Ltd is already working with 25 local authorities to look at opportunities for partnerships in service delivery, but the report calls for a wider take-up, with the Post Office network not only becoming a “front office for government”, but for local government as well.
Andy Furey, the national officer at the Communication Workers Union, said the CentreForum report makes a case that other areas of government could make use of the Post Office as a community hub.
“The Post Office network is essential to local communities, offering services that cannot be found elsewhere. Local government should work more closely with the Post Office to take advantage of the prominence of post offices in communities across the UK,” he said.
