Postbank’s financial services, such as issuing cash, will soon no longer be available in post office partner branches. The austerity measure affects around 1,800 stationery stores and other retailers.
Deutsche Bank wants to stop offering financial services from its subsidiary Postbank in postal partner branches by the end of 2025. “We have been observing for some time that customers are increasingly carrying out their banking transactions online and the proportion of cashless payments is increasing,” a spokesman for the institute told the Handelsblatt.
“With this in mind, we have decided to gradually stop offering these banking services in Deutsche Post’s partner branches by the end of 2025.” According to the newspaper, around 1,800 Swiss Post partner shops are affected by the measure, including stationery stores and other retailers. In addition to the services of Deutsche Post, they also offer financial services from Postbank – such as issuing cash.
Postbank branch network will be almost halved
Deutsche Bank is thus reducing the presence of its Postbank subsidiary even further. The financial institution only announced in October that it would close numerous Postbank branches in the coming years. 250 of the 550 branches are to be closed by mid-2026.
Postbank itself is not talking about closures; rather, it wants to offer a “streamlined branch network” and develop into a “mobile first” bank. That would correspond to the behavior of customers.
Increased use of bank branches
The proportion of customers who predominantly use a bank branch and only occasionally use online banking has actually increased again in recent years: According to a survey by the digital association Bitkom, the proportion of these bank customers fell to a low of seven percent in 2021 – In 2023, however, it was back to 17 percent. At the same time, the proportion of customers who do predominantly or exclusively online banking has recently declined again.
However, the trend towards branch closures has not only been observed at Postbank, but across the industry for years. For example, the number of Volksbank and Raiffeisen Bank branches in Germany shrank rapidly – from 13,211 in 2012 to 7,512 in 2022.
Significantly fewer Sparkasse branches
And this number is also worth noting: Sparkasse customers have significantly fewer branches available to them in North Rhine-Westphalia than before. As the Westphalia-Lippe Savings Banks Association announced today upon request, the savings banks in the region had 1,052 branches at the turn of the year, 4.6 percent fewer than a year earlier. The decline was similarly high in previous years.
Savings banks nationwide have drastically thinned out their branch networks in recent years. According to statistics from the Deutsche Bundesbank, at the end of 2022 there were only 362 savings bank institutions and 7,326 domestic branches. For comparison: in 2012 there were 423 institutes and 12,643 branches.