Newsagent Ray Burgess is a good customer for a bank, he just cannot find one.
To run his small business in the Gippsland town of Morwell, Mr Burgess needs to deposit and withdraw cash several times each week but, due to bank closures, he's been forced to change banks four times in less than a year.
"Two banks closed down. One closed their across-the-counter facility and kept the branch as administration (only) and the other one left the town," he said.
"In just over a 12-month period … we lost five across-the-counter banks in the uptown area here in Morwell, and we were left with one."
Two of the banks Mr Burgess relied on closed their branch doors permanently, while another moved to the other side of town.
He was a customer with two of the banks for only two months each as he tried, desperately, to access a service vital for his business.
Mr Burgess said the remaining branches in Morwell are under-resourced.
"If there are people away at your branch they'll shut your branch and go off to it, and that's all banks that I've had experience with," he said.
"It's not very good if you rock over to the bank and … they're shut. They're apologetic the next day when you go in there, but they're still shut when you want to use them."
The difficulties facing Mr Burgess are impacting the lives of many other regional Australians, as face-to-face bank services become increasingly hard to access.
In the past five years, there has been a 30 per cent drop in the number of bank branches in Australia, with the closure rate even faster in remote and very remote areas.
On Thursday, a parliamentary hearing into regional bank branch closures is taking place in Sale, a city in the same region as Mr Burgess's newsagency.
The hearing will be one of several in a broader inquiry by the Senate, examining the reasons for the closures and how they impact communities.
'Real opportunity' to raise concerns
Federal MP Darren Chester said the inquiry would provide customers, small business owners and local councillors with a direct voice to senators.
"This is a real opportunity for us to raise those concerns in a respectful way … But also [to] put forward ideas that might work going forward, rather than this lazy option of just shutting down a branch to try and save a few bucks," the Nationals member for Gippsland said.
Mr Chester said the inquiry would hold hearings in many regional towns, listening to the concerns of people across Australia.
"[The inquiry] needs to hear a representative sample of what people are saying to them right across rural and regional Australia, and then make recommendations to the parliament," he said.
"I call on the banks and the Australian Banking Association to actually listen to what the people are saying."
Australian Banking Association chief executive Anna Bligh acknowledged that the pace of change in the sector had been "very rapid".
"I'm not surprised that, for some people, it's a pretty big and quite difficult change to adjust to," she said.
Banks prioritising digital services
Ms Bligh said foot traffic inside bank branches had declined by almost 70 per cent in recent years.
She said that banks fund Australia Post to deliver a basic banking service, which offers some basic transactions.
"You can't get a loan in a post office, but most people aren't doing that every week," she said.
"These are the sorts of things you can now do online … you can access a mortgage now on a Zoom call."
Ms Bligh said banks were taking resources out of "bricks and mortar" and funnelling them into digital services, because that's what customers were using.
As an example, Ms Bligh pointed to the recent closure of NAB's branch in Maffra.
Cash withdrawals had declined to just 418 for the whole of 2022 at the branch in the town.
NAB's data said only 59 per cent of its Maffra customers went to the branch during the past year. Just 11 customers visited more frequently than once a month.
"That's not people leaving town, that is people in town transforming the way that they bank," she said.
"In fact, Maffra's population has grown, so the town is not in decline. But the people in Maffra changed the way they banked during COVID. And they're not going back".
Pandemic 'excuse'
However, the Finance Sector Union's Wendy Streets said banks used the pandemic as an excuse to speed up closures.
"The usual answer that they give you is, 'Well, the foot traffic has disappeared' but, really, they've not waited to get back to the end of the pandemic to see whether that foot traffic increases again," Ms Streets said.
"They've made hay while the sun shines."
Ms Streets estimated that up to 900 branches have closed since the pandemic began.
Data from the banking regulator, APRA, backs that up.
Further, over a period of five years, the number of branches has fallen from 5,694 in 2017 to 4,014 in 2022: a 30 per cent fall.
The union represents bank workers, and Ms Streets pointed to multiple models that can help sustain smaller and quieter branches: In one, the branch opens shorter hours in the town, before staff maintain full-time hours by doing phone banking services for customers around the nation.
"And it keeps a presence in the town," she said, "but they're not putting any other towns into that model, because they're not saving enough money.
"I think, when you've got four big banks who make a smidge over $30 billion profit from the Australian community last year, I don't think it's a big ask to say, 'Keep some property in the smaller regions of Australia'. They can afford it."
Calls to postpone closures
The new inquiry follows last year's report by the Regional Banking Taskforce, which made recommendations for the companies to conduct impact assessments before closing branches.
That recommendation comes into effect in the middle of this year.
At the time, Mr Chester said the banks had agreed to the taskforce's recommendations, then "fast-tracked more closures".
In a letter to the banks, the chair of the inquiry, LNP Senator Matthew Canavan, said branch closures before the recommendations came into effect "would not be an example of good faith by the banking sector".
Earlier this month, Westpac postponed the planned closures of eight of its branches across regional Australia, after a similar announcement by the Commonwealth Bank.
However, some of Westpac's regional and remote branches have still closed this year, including one at Coober Pedy in South Australia, which was the town's only bank.
A document submitted for the hearing in Sale said ANZ had postponed "announcing any further closures" but would proceed with 14 closures that were announced last year and that are almost complete.
Real impact and community solutions
The closure of nearby bank branches has also reduced the level of business in Mr Burgess's newsagency.
"The good thing about the banks in Morwell, they were spread throughout the town, so every little retail area had a bank nearby to it," he said.
"We all had our people [who] would do their banking and then shop nearby. We really noticed when the one we were using, 20 metres from us, closed down."
He said some customers have told him they don't feel safe withdrawing cash from ATMs, because the reduced number of machines means dozens of people often line up at once.
Mr Burgess said that, if the banks wanted to, they could rent a building together and have their own small branch service alongside one another.
"There's lots of ways you could work around it … but I don't think they're thinking about preserving the bank presence. They're trying to drive everyone to a digital economy," he said.
He said he had approached banks about setting up a service from his newsagency shopfront.
"When I offered to have an agency in our shop … to offer a service for oldies and others [who] wanted to have across-the-counter banking, they virtually laughed at me," he said.
He said the banks were focused on profits and they were closing branches at a "speed that's a bit indecent, really".
