Farmers would rather bank online – BOI boss

Farmers would rather do their banking business online or by telephone so that they can spend their day running their farm, Bank of Ireland chief executive Francesca McDonagh has claimed.

Speaking at a hearing of the Oireachtas Finance Committee, she defended the bank’s recent decision to reduce its number of physical branches by 88 from 257 to 169 from September onwards.

She said the bank was responding to a change in consumer behaviour and that similar changes were occurring in other sectors.

“Not everyone necessarily enjoys going into a branch. If customers can find a more convenient instant way, for example, to apply for a loan, they will do so,” she said.

According to Ms McDonagh, some 80pc of Bank of Ireland’s loans in the agricultural sector are done outside of branches.

“We bank 40,000 farmers. When we speak to farmers, we hear they would prefer one of our mobile advisers to visit them… and this would have been pre-Covid,” she said.

“They would rather do their business online or by telephone so that they can spend their day running their farm. This is about customer behaviour.”

ICMSA president Pat McCormack

said it wasn’t clear whether mass bank branch closures reflected changes in customer behaviour or actually caused it.

It was not good enough, he said, for essential services like banking or access to state agencies and departments to be reserved exclusively for those who were comfortable online or had the option at all.

“Of course we recognise the migration to online business,” he said. “But we don’t accept that just highlighting that can be the end of any debate.

“What about those elderly people — often customers of many decades of Ms McDonagh’s bank — who don’t have the skills to access online or even the necessary infrastructure or coverage? What happens them?

“There’s a fair degree of ‘chicken and egg’ logic being deployed here, where we see commercial and state enterprises closing down bricks-and-mortar locations and then pointing at the resultant replacement digital business as a justification for the closures in the first place.

“But sure, the people had to go online because that was the only way of accessing the services after they disappeared physically.

Online Editors