This week, I have no doubt the local paper the Coalville & Ashby Times will be full of commentary about the closure of Lloyds Bank in Coalville, the final bank branch in North West Leicestershire’s largest town.
It is more than just the loss of another corporate logo from the high street. It marks the end of face-to-face banking in a town of significant size and economic importance. Earlier this week I wrote on my blog that Coalville must now secure a banking hub, urgently. Not as a sentimental throwback to the past, but as a practical transitional solution.
Banking hubs are not a permanent answer to the direction of travel in financial services. Over time, as digital adoption increases and the number of people relying on physical banking reduces, even hubs may see their relevance decline. But we are not there yet. Right now, they are essential infrastructure.
Small businesses need to deposit cash takings. Elderly residents value speaking to a person rather than navigating automated phone systems. Many people, quietly and without fuss, are simply not comfortable managing their entire financial life through a screen.
All politicians, regardless of party, along with regulators and government, should be working together to facilitate this as quickly as possible. This should not be about party political point scoring. It should be about serving the community.
But the closure of our last bank raises a broader, more fundamental question: are we being nudged, or pushed, towards a cashless society?
Access to cash is undeniably becoming more difficult. Bank branches are closing nationwide. Free ATMs are disappearing. Increasingly, some businesses operate on a card-only basis, a trend that accelerated dramatically during the pandemic. For many, digital payments are quick, efficient and convenient. I use them daily myself.
Yet there is another side to the debate.
From a governmental perspective, reduced cash circulation increases transparency and improves tax compliance. Every transaction leaves a digital trail. Every purchase becomes data. Some argue that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. But privacy is not about wrongdoing, it is about autonomy.
A fully cashless society would mean every transaction is recorded, stored and potentially analysed. We know that data, at any level, is not infallibly secure. Large corporations trade consumer data as a commodity. Cyber breaches are commonplace. Purchasing patterns are valuable assets in the digital economy.
There is also a resilience argument. Cash provides fallback when systems fail, whether through cyber attack, power outage or technical malfunction. Remove cash entirely and society becomes wholly dependent on digital infrastructure functioning perfectly at all times.
None of this is an argument against technology or progress. Digital banking has transformed financial services for the better in many ways. But progress should be evolutionary, not coercive.
The real concern is not whether digital payments grow, they will. It is whether physical cash quietly disappears before society has properly debated what that means.
For my part, I believe cash still has a role to play. Not as the dominant form of payment forever, but as a safeguard, for privacy, for resilience and for those who rely upon it.
The question is not whether change is coming. It is whether we are consciously choosing it, or simply drifting towards it without noticing what we are losing along the way.
