Are bank tellers an endangered species?

And the answer is... YES

RE-KYC, request for change of postal / email address and release of dormant accounts are examples of new tasks that are regularly entering the banking milieu of late. Much as customers might want to carry out such tasks remotely, they seem to require branch visits universally. As highlighted in this Q&A, bankers have started visiting customers at home or office to collect documents for new account opening, mortgage application, etc. If tellers can be retrained to handle "compliance" and "omnichannel" activities like these, they won't become an endangered species, even if volumes of their traditional tasks decline. 

@Ketharaman - the problem is one of regulations and policy. Are you telling me customers would rather go down the branch to change an address, that do that online if they could at all avoid it?

That is what we call a 'false positive'. Saying branches are great because they let customers change their address in person is one thing, forcing customers to do that ONLY through a face-to-face interaction is another thing entirely. 

I wonder if any bank tellers read this, and if so, I hope they understand that some of us, as consumers, really value them.

People who understand about, care about, and have time for, people.

Sure, technology means many of us don’t need to bother them with mundane things like ‘how much do I have in my account’. Maybe for large parts of our lives we don’t need to talk to a teller at all.

But that’s not all of us – and I’m talking about people who have been banked all their lives, not just the ‘unbanked’.

Some banks prefer not to service people who can’t, or prefer not to, interact with the banking sector exclusively via technology. That’s their choice – up to a point. If all banks do that, there’s a problem. And it’s a big one.

As the chairmen of the main UK banks said at the BBA conference – ‘we’re granted a licence by the government and with that comes social responsibility’.  Politicians listen hard to the unmass market, precisely because it can get left out; and that sometimes results in regulation; which in turn results in the kind of unintended consequences that hog-tie banks from being able to invest in new technologies such as app-based banking.

‘Banking’ doesn’t just mean ‘banks’. So called ‘non-bank’ providers such as Credit Unions are part of the ‘banking’ ecosystem. They can help more (if the banks help them to).

The role of the bank teller does need to change, to adjust. That’s progress. But it’s not prudent to extrapolate that to ‘in the future all people will interact with their banks exclusively via electronic channels’. Technology can help…. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/banking/10468109/How-your-bank-could-look-in-five-years-time.html

Individual banks quite rightly will choose to deal with certain segments, but ‘banking’ needs to deal with everyone. Or it will be forced to, and that will hurt more.

@NeilB + 1. Kudos for bringing up this angle, which I'd completely forgotten about. In all these years of banking with several banks, I can recall several occasions when tellers have helped me out e.g. Increase yield by prematurely closing a fixed deposit and reopening it to take advantage of a recent increase in interest rate; Correct the account number I'd written on the pay in slip while trying to deposit a high-value cheque that favored a different a/c #. I'm sure there must've been an equal # of occasions in which branch managers and relationship managers were involved in a similar capacity but, somehow, I'm only able to remember these bankers in connection with RE-KYC, NetBanking activation and other painful tasks that forced me to visit branches. 

@Neil Absolutely. While all the metrics in branch usage are going south, whether it is average number of visits per customer per year, revenue, utilization, cross-sell/up-sell conversion rates, etc. the fact is that there is a role in the psychology of customers for a branch when they get into trouble. 

While the branch for most customers won't any longer factor into their day-to-day banking environment, when a customer has an issue, tries to solve it via mobile, web, call centre and can't - they'll go to the branch. At that point, the person who serves them in the branch is the single most important person in the brand relationship and if they can't fix the problem on that one visit - the brand relationship is over. The implications of this are that you need fantastic all rounders, great service people (not product or transaction) and excellent in-branch support systems to make that happen. Not tellers, not financial product advisors.

Oh, and if you are like @Katharaman and you think that Mr. Bank 3.0 has just predicted branches are coming back because we need people in the branch to solve our biggest service problems? You're wrong. We will still only need half the branches we have today to provide this kind of support network, and then they will generally be 1/3rd of the size they are today hovering around 1-2,000 square feet in footprint.