Banking giant Halifax is closing two more branches in the north early in the new year, reducing its network locally to single figures.
The shutters will come down at its flagship Belfast Castlecourt branch on February 4 and then at Belfast Connswater on February 10.
Customers of those branches have been contacted in recently days via text message.
It’s more than two years Halifax owner Lloyds Banking Group last made cuts to its branches portfolio in the north, with Coleraine the most recent to shut in January 2023.
The lender said: “Before we close any branch, we look at how our customers are managing their money and using the branch.
“Most customers are now using our mobile banking app, online banking or calling us instead.
“This means they are using branches, including Belfast Castlecourt and Connswater, much less, and because of this, we’ll be closing these branches.”
By the end of this year, more than 400 banks across the UK will have shut their doors amid the unrelenting rush towards online banking, leaving many towns without a main bank and left to travel many miles to their nearest branch or rely on the Post Office.
Lloyds Banking Group, which includes Halifax and Bank of Scotland, will close a total of 190 branches in 2024 and 102 next year.
Last February Lloyds also said it would be selling its Belfast headquarters at the Gasworks and relocate to shared city centre offices in 2025.
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It has taken a 10-year lease at the 155,000 sq ft Paper Exchange, an 11 storey mixed-use building in Belfast’s Chichester Street, where its customer specialist support team will occupy two floors (7th and 8th), sharing the building with several other organisations.
Lloyds said at the time that the move “doesn’t impact the number or type of roles” for the 1,600 staff currently based at Cromac Place.
In September a report by Which? revealed that just 110 physical bank branches now remain in Northern Ireland - equivalent to 5.8 per 100,000 of the population.
Its analysis found that a total of 6,161 banks in the UK have closed their doors permanently since 2015, including more than 100 in Northern Ireland, where 52 branches (27% of the region’s total bank branch network) were permanently shut in less than three years between May 2020 and January 2023.
Only 83 of the so-called ‘big four’ (Danske Bank, Bank of Ireland, Ulster Bank and AIB) currently remain open in the north, but it is understood that at least one of those organisations is planning a further cull of its bricks-and-mortar operations in 2025.
