NIB To Shut Down Branch Network

JTMan

http://www.nationalirishbank.ie/en-ie/About-National-Irish-Bank/Press/Press-releases/2012/Pages/nib-business-reorganisation.aspx

From November, National Irish Bank will close its branch network (27 branches) and serve customers through a new Personal Banking Centre. As well as day-to-day banking, the large team of qualified financial advisors in the centre will be able to facilitate applications for any of our products over the ‘phone. The branch closures will be completed by mid-November, at which time National Irish Bank will convert its nine locations to Personal Banking Units. Customers can meet financial advisors face-to-face in locations in Waterford, Athlone, Cork, Limerick, Letterkenny and across Dublin in the IFSC, Tallaght, Swords and Stillorgan. It is anticipated that there will be 100 voluntary-led redundancies as a result of this reorganisation.
To support and facilitate this change, the Bank’s new Personal Banking Centre will be open 7 days a week from September 2012, with extended opening hours of 8am - 8pm Monday to Friday and 9am - 4.30pm on Saturday and Sunday. Customers can also continue to avail of cash and cheque lodgement facilities through the Bank’s partnership with An Post. National Irish Bank is in the process of communicating directly with all of its customers. The changes will not affect the day-to-day running of customers’ accounts.

JTMan

More from RTE here: http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0628/nib-to-close-20-branches-with-100-redundancies.html

Wireless net

will the Drogheda branch be one of the ones closing down?

sentient_6

From a personal banking stand point this isn't going to change anything for me because i seem to haven't had need of a branch since they did their initial closures two years ago.

Somebody planted a seed in my head on here though that i could've done without, on that thread about the account changes, that this is all leading to an eventual exit from Ireland. Which id rather not happen as i don't like the idea of dealing with any other irish bank or ulster. I briefly had a BOI a/c a few years ago & it was painful both going into the branch & using 365, which at the time was utter crap compared to NIB's ebanking.

Wireless net wrote: »

will the Drogheda branch be one of the ones closing down?

It would appear so. See here for the 9 staying open anyway, which are only open to visit by appointment it seems:

http://www.nationalirishbank.ie/en-ie/About-National-Irish-Bank/Customer-information/2012/Pages/Customer-QA.aspx

BuffyBot

I noted this in their FAQ

Yes. Customers can avail of the 'cash-back' facility on their Laser/VISA debit card and in addition, they also have access to a network of over 3,000 ATMs throughout Ireland.

Looks like the first indication they're killing off Laser too that I've seen

dublin daz

yes, in that statement it says:

In the coming months, the internationally-recognised Visa Debit card will be introduced to replace the existing Laser card service.

Their branch closure wont be any great loss. The branch staff have been redundant since they went cashless / chequeless.

smemon

What i don't like about NIB is how they constantly hype the crap out of their 'cutting edge' technology and tell us this is the way things are going and they're simply leading the way. They weren't the first bank to bring our mobile apps, they weren't the first bank to introduce ebanking...

The reality is, ALL Irish eBanking facilities are woeful. I'm more than happy to see NIB shut down provided they introduce machines to lodge cash & cheques like these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsblR3LPjLY

Having to go to a post office to lodge cash / cheques is a joke and is just making life more difficult for customers. The reality is post offices are usually busy, especially dole / pension / childrens allowance days so head in at those times and you could be queuing out the door.

Self service machines are the way forward and they can fire all staff for all i care so long as they actually replace them with machines and don't palm us off to the post office where you still have do deal with humans & queues. Stick as few machines in post offices or replace existing ATMs and it'll speed things up.

Their technology is not as mature enough as they think imo. Nobody cares about the PR hype around their ebanking - ebanking alone is useless in today's world. The reality is a lot of people still use cash and cheques for various reasons and unless they co-ordinate efforts with other banks to do away with cash & cheques, they're deluded if they think they can single-handedly change the way people do banking here.

Rock Steady Edy

They could do worse than model themselves on first direct in the UK, which have no branches but are excellent. I still have an account with them that I opened 20 years ago.

Going into an NIB branch was never a bad experience, rarely any queues, but since they got rid of lodgements there was no reason to go in any more, and the opening hours of 10-4 were not great. Agree with the previous comments about lodging at the post office and lodging machines.

The final straw were the current account charges they recently introduced, so we moved our account to Ulster. Great move that turned out to be, given the news about IT problems! NIB IT is good though, Ulster can't even process International bank payments - I tried and failed several times and was told there's a problem with no date scheduled for it to be fixed, so you have to go in to a branch. Nice to have the Saturday opening, and good savings interest rates with them though.

I'd go back to NIB in the morning if they got rid of the bank charges, had competitive products and machines somewhere to lodge payments into. In my experience, I think they're more efficient than Ulster as regards IT and phone banking.

homer911

I hear the "Head of Retail" who sent out those stupid letters talking about "rewarding my loyalty" by introducing bank charges has already got the push - and he was only there for about a year having come from ACCBank where he shut their branches - sounds like he did himself out of a job