Originally published in the Baltimore Business Journal. Read the full article.
“‘It’s a large cost-saving measure that banks can implement,’ said Mac McComas, senior program manager for the 21st Century Cities Initiative at Johns Hopkins University. ‘You see everybody go online and I think banks really took advantage of that moment to say, “Hey, we were already doing this slow optimization of where our branches are. All of a sudden we see a lot fewer people coming in so let’s accelerate that trend.” People might not need to go into a branch in the White L, but in the Black Butterfly they certainly do,’ McComas said. ‘There is a huge loss of service there.’”