MEDIA RELEASE
Acknowledging a national trend showing more people are finding it increasingly convenient to bank online at home or with their smart phones, SouthCrest Bank announces plans to consolidate its South College Street drive through service into its full service branch bank’s drive-through on North Main Street.
The final day of service for the stand-alone drive-through at 435 South College Street will be Friday, Dec. 9. All employees at the site will relocate to the main office at 967 North Main Street. No current employees of the bank will be adversely affected by this consolidation.
“While our overall deposit balances in Cedartown have remained constant over the past few years, our teller transaction volume has continued to slowly decline consistent with the national trends. More and more of our customers are utilizing our convenient mobile banking platform each month. As a result, we will now be able to fully staff the North Main Street office and provide all of our customers the same fast, friendly service they have come to appreciate from SouthCrest Bank,” declared Linda Burch, Vice President and Market Leader for the West Georgia Region of SouthCrest Bank.
“Recently, we upgraded all of our ATMs in Cedartown to allow customers the ability to deposit both cash and checks,” she explained. “We will continue to operate our very popular ATMs in both Cedartown locations, allowing customers to get cash, check balances and make deposits on their schedule, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”
Mobile banking on the rise, study shows
Mobile banking use continued to rise last year (2015) as smartphone adoption grew and consumers were increasingly drawn to the convenience of mobile financial services, according to a Federal Reserve Board report, Consumers and Mobile Financial Services 2016, released in March. “Use of mobile banking continues to rise. Forty-three percent of all mobile phone owners with a bank account had used mobile banking in the 12 months prior to the survey, up from 39 percent in 2014 and 33 percent in 2013,” the Federal Reserve study found.
SouthCrest confirms similar trends in its branches throughout Georgia. “While the need to provide personal, dedicated, in-person service is always paramount to the foundation of our banking relationships, reduced utilization of this drive-through location has led us to review our branch strategy,” said Eddie Wilson, President of the SouthCrest Community Banking Group. “By consolidating the two branches, we can continue to provide the exceptional service our customers desire in one location just over a mile away.”
As early as 2013, a study by American Banker Magazine reported: “As consumers increasingly use self-service channels from wherever they wish, financial institutions are reimagining their physical footprints, including drive-ups, to adjust.”