Bank of America’s recently announced plan to phase out drive-through teller windows is based on declining rates of usage at the individual sites targeted for closure. No jobs are to be lost, says a BofA spokesperson; staffers instead will be freed up to perform other tasks, including expanded teller duties, working as lobby greeters and instructing customers how to use mobile apps – one of the technologies that helped edge out the drive-through window in the first place.
Other big banks – TD and Citi – say they have no current plans to close their drive-through windows.
Somebody had to raise the question, though, of how much of a village it takes to sustain a vintage technology that dates from the 1930s. The immediate media reaction to BofA’s news included objections from customers who for various justifiable reasons want to do teller-based transactions from their cars rather than walking into a branch. Predictably, news stories featured at least one customer who said he would switch banks as a result of the phasing out of drive-up teller windows.
Customers want real-time human acknowledgment of transactions such as mortgage and credit card payments, or accounts receivable/payable if they’re a small business, for example.
BofA is responding by replacing the old technology with something new – a pilot program called ATM Teller Assist in Boston and Atlanta. Its ATMs have a video/audio component allowing customers to interact in real time with tellers in two remote-location call centers. The program is ADA-compliant and is offered in both English and Spanish during extended hours. Boston has three pilot ATM Teller Assist locations, Cambridge has two, Wakefield and Saugus each have one, and more are planned, the spokesperson says.
This is hardly the first time an old technology has ceded to the new. It’s happened before, and we got over it.
In the 1950s, telephone area codes were developed to make routing of long-distance calls easier as the country’s phone system grew. By the mid-1960s they had been implemented across the United States and in many other countries.
We had to use them, and some of us didn’t like it. Song parodist Allan Sherman captured the zeitgeist of the country in 1963 with the song, Let’s All Call Up AT&T and Protest to the President March. Sherman wailed, “Can you see him smirking and smiling/ ‘Cause he’s got us all digit dialing?” He urged acolytes to write down an impossibly long, but lyrically-scanning, string of hypothetical numbers to contact the AT&T chief, and additionally, “If he won’t change the rules/ let’s take our business to another phone company.” Fat chance. Back then, AT&T was The Phone Company. Fast forward 50 years later and … well, you know.
BofA knows it’s not The Bank. The market for bank services has become fragmented, but in a good way, and the development of new technology lowers the cost of offering more choices.
