Over the past five years, 1,700 branches of UK’s largest banks (Lloyds, Barclays, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and Santander) have closed and the trend doesn’t seem to be running out of steam. In fact, Lloyds proceeded with its strategy to continue cutting 665 positions and closing 49 branches – a fraction of the already 9,435 jobs shed in the past couple of years. Only two years ago, the UK bank had announced its strategy to shed 12,000 jobs and 400 branches by 2017.
As a consequence, Lloyds confirmed its will to deploy a fleet of 8 mobile branches to provide rural communities with banking services.
Worker’s unions are raising their voices against this generalised trend as they consider it detrimental to bank employees as well as to customers in more isolated regions.
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