(14 April 2010 – UK) A British bank has announced plans to stop small cash withdrawals at branches to speed up its customers waiting times.The UK’s Nationwide Building Society has said it plans to ban all small value cash withdrawals at its branch counters in an effort to reduce queuing times and move more routine transactions to the ATM.
The bank has said that it will be increasing its minimum cash withdrawal for FlexAccount and CashBuilder customers, who have an ATM card, from £30.00 to £100.00 (A$166.00).
The society said in a statement that the initiative, to be introduced in June, will make its branches more efficient, help reduce queues, speed up transactions and free up its staffs time to deal with more complex transactions.
Nationwide’s divisional director of the branch network, Graeme Hughes, told the BBC’s MoneyBox programme the change was essential.
Mr Hughes noted that around one third of all counter transactions are carried out by less than 8 percent of the society’s customer base and the other 92 percent have asked Nationwide what it can do to speed up its queues.
What Nationwide is trying to do is to look at alternative ways of dealing with these customers, Mr Hughes added.