Post Office banking
Consumer Focus has established itself as an authoritative and influential voice in the Post Office banking debate. We have identified and promoted the benefits that Post Office banking could deliver for consumers; and used our wider work on the Post Office network to provide evidence of the problems that must be addressed in order for this potential to be realised.
Positives for consumers
An expansion of Post Office banking would:
- stimulate choice and competition in the banking sector by offering a multi-channel, trusted alternative to High Street banks
- ensure universal access to transactional banking services, which would be of particular value to those communities where no bank is present (rural and urban deprived communities in particular)
- as part of its product portfolio, offer low-income consumers a custom account that is designed around and responsive to their needs; as well as promoting access to affordable credit and tailored savings products. Our response drew heavily on the ‘Opportunity Knocks’ research described in the following section
Our Opportunity knocks research, published in January 2010, established what a banking product that better meets the needs of low-income consumers would look like, as well as how they would feel about accessing such an account through the Post Office.
The findings of this research showed that the Post Office network is well placed to offer banking services. It attracts high levels of trust, is seen as a safe place for money and is deemed to understand its customers and work hard to help them. However, some people that we surveyed reported a number of frustrations with the Post Office experience, including queues and inconvenient opening hours. These have to be addressed to pave the way for wider banking and financial services at the Post Office.
In the coming year we will look to build on the findings of Opportunity knocks by working with other organisations and consumers to establish the business case for offering this type of transactional account at the Post Office and to examine options for meeting associated costs.
