NAB mulls opening branches on Sunday as it expands weekend trading   

Financial Review
Jan 31, 2025

National Australia Bank is considering opening branches in shopping centres on Sunday and will extend trading hours to all-day on Saturday to more than two dozen locations from this weekend. 

While NAB will have 29 stores open on Saturdays, it is still weighing up whether to open on Sundays. If it does, it would be the first major bank to trade on Sunday in decades. Both Commonwealth Bank and ANZ experimented with opening some outlets on Sundays in the past.


NAB is thinking about whether to open some of its branches on a Sunday.

“Everything is on the table. I am considering it, absolutely,” said Ana Marinkovic, who runs NAB’s personal banking arm, of Sunday branch openings.

Ms Marinkovic, who joined NAB in 2019 and was elevated last April, said the bank’s decision to open branches on weekends was not in response to political pressure. Instead, she said, it was in the hopes of increasing customer satisfaction scores after positive feedback from trials.

Labor and the Coalition have pushed banks to keep branches open, although that effort has been focused on keeping country sites operating. As revealed by The Australian Financial Review last year, Treasury is considering a new industry levy to support rural banking services.

The last time there was significant competition at bank branches on weekends was in 2007 when CBA said it would open some on Sundays. At the time, ANZ operated two branches on Sundays. Those openings were at a time of intense competition for customers, with the expansion of BankWest, now a CBA subsidiary then owned by Scotland’s HBOS.

CBA and Westpac still open a handful of branches on Saturdays. NAB has 12 and will increase that number by 17. But the increase in weekend trading comes amid a shrinking overall footprint. NAB had 515 branches in 2022, a number which fell to 458 in 2023 and to 439 at the end of last year.

The Finance Sector Union said it was “pleased to see a bank doing something other than cutting staff, branches and services”.

“It’s about time we saw banks compete on service and not just try and get more profit from customers,” said the union’s national secretary Julia Angrisano.   

NAB declined to say how much the extended trading hours would cost. It intends to open branches in suburban Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth on Saturdays from this weekend, Ms Marinkovic said.

The number of branches has fallen as customers increasingly move their banking online. The number of over-the-counter transactions has decreased by 70 per cent since 2015, with NAB telling a parliamentary inquiry last year that only 3 per cent of its retail banking customers exclusively used its branch network. Only 8 per cent of its business banking customers were in the same category, the bank added.

Nevertheless, Ms Marinkovic said the bank needed to make “an investment into an asset that is a good reflection of our brand in our communities”.

“I am making this investment to demonstrate our customer obsession, and that we will be there for customers when it suits them. I am not purely looking at it from revenue generation or a cost perspective.”

Despite the diminishing numbers of customers using bank branches, they remain a politically sensitive issue. In December, CBA quickly reversed a decision to charge more customers $3 each time they withdrew money over the counter. That move would likely have saved money for most customers, given it cut monthly account-keeping fees by $2 per month.

At the time, Financial Services Minister Stephen Jones called the fee “a tax on Australians who demand the right to use their cash”.

The latest data from the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority showed the number of bank branches declined nationally by nearly 50 per cent between 2011 and 2024. Closures continued last year, with 230 branches across the sector shutting to June 2024. Most closures were in major cities.

Unlike CBA and Westpac, NAB has not put a moratorium on further regional branch closures. But NAB said it will hire an additional 150 home loan bankers and also add 39 ATMs to its fleet.   

whiteknight wrote on Jan 31^st, 2025 at 5:50pm:



Online banking.

What will they think of next??

whiteknight wrote on Jan 31^st, 2025 at 5:54pm:

ATMs. Or cash out in the supermarket.

What will they think of next?

whiteknight wrote on Jan 31^st, 2025 at 6:19pm:

Why?

Your issues are laughable. I imagine you as some Sandy Stone old duffer for whom the 50's were just too fast and furious - with bizzarro lashings of up to the minute Greens and union delusions.

whiteknight wrote on Jan 31^st, 2025 at 5:47pm:


Sounds stupid when NAB are one of the biggest closers of regional branches.

Why open weekends when they have spent years trying to dissuade people from coming into branches to use a teller(which they have few) and use outside ATMs?

whiteknight wrote on Jan 31^st, 2025 at 6:37pm:


They could do that easily if the just provided decent service Monday to Friday.

Stop closing regional branches & chasing people outside to use ATMs or go home & do it on line.

I think this is just a gimmick that will run short term.

A NAB branch in Innisfail the other Friday closed early because of an airconditioning failure.

Left a note on the door apologising for inconvenience & advising that customers could access branches in Tully(53 klms away), Atherton(100 klm away) or Earlville(83klm away).

Managerial Staff have absolutely no clue about or consideration for elderly people who have limited tech savvy.   

This is a publicity stunt. If they were serious about customer satisfaction they would re-open all the branches they have shut in recent years.