According to insiders, a US bank is shockingly closing all of its branches by the end of September, leaving just two in the region.
On September 19, Santander will seal the doors to one of its Connecticut bank branches.
According to Patch.com, one of Santander’s three West Hartford branches will permanently close its doors on September 19.
The change was officially announced last week in a document submitted to federal officials.
Santander assured the outlet that the Boulevard branch’s ATM would continue to operate even if the physical facility closed.
Although certain services will remain at the Boulevard location, some will be relocated to another Santander in West Hartford.
Their merging Boulevard and Farmington Avenue branches are only two miles apart. There is still one Santander location on Main Street.
The bank also runs a few ATMs inside West Hartford CVS pharmacies.
Customers’ shifting preferences have diminished the need for physical stores, leading to this latest closure.
Santander verified to Patch.com that it is seeing an increase in online service usage at the expense of in-store usage.
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Ct Insider reports that eleven Santander branches in the state have closed since 2019; the West Hartford site is the eleventh.
Many financial institutions around the country have recently closed their doors, claiming the rise of online banking as the reason behind their decision.
Statistics from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation show that the number of active branches in the Constitution State has been declining during 2018.
The number of banks in the state decreased by 16% from June 30, 2018, to 2023, as revealed by data viewed by the Hartford Business Journal.
New England banks had 1,159 branches as of June 30, 2018, according to FDIC data; by the same date in 2023, that number had dropped to 973.
According to FDIC data, Santander has minimized its branch footprint from 32 in 2014 to 15 by 2023, making it one of the more active banks in the state to reduce branch locations.
According to Santander’s executive chair Anna Botin, who announced at an annual meeting in Madrid in March, the move comes as the business “embarks on a global transformation to become a digital bank with branches.”
Statistics from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency show that more than 220 bank branches nationwide were shuttered in the first two months of 2024.
Nearly 100 branches were closed in just eight weeks by Bank of America, US Bank, and Citizens Bank, putting them at the top of the list.
The rate of closures has decreased, but they are still rather high; for example, US Bank announced seven branch closures in an entire week.
Chase was the next financial institution to follow suit, with two branches closing, and Bank of America with six.
With the filing of reports with the OCC by each bank in the first week of July, the fifteen closures in Illinois, New Jersey, California, and Wisconsin were announced.
Furthermore, TD Bank has already announced numerous East Coast branch closures, with more to come before the year ends.
Due to the rise of Internet banking and a need to cut costs, more than 400 branches of national banks have closed their doors this year.
