Death of the bank branch: An obituary written from 2035

Looking back from 2035, the death of the bank branch was not a sudden collapse. It was a slow, structural exit, accelerated by open banking, and completed by a generation of customers who simply stopped showing up.

Working in product delivery at Credit Direct meant having a front-row seat to the branch’s final years. Every API integration, every instant credit decision, every customer onboarded without setting foot in a building told the same story.

The branch was not slowly dying. It had already been replaced. The industry was just slow to say it out loud.

For over a century, the bank branch was where Nigerians went to do anything financial: deposits, withdrawals, transfers, and loans. It was a service point and a trust signal at the same time. Customers believed their money was safe because they could see the building it sat in. That role was real, and it lasted. But in the early 2020s, the cracks appeared. Mobile apps offered instant transfers, and fintechs delivered loans and micro-investments in minutes. Digital payment systems let merchants and customers skip the branch entirely. A generation raised on speed and convenience stopped tolerating queues and paperwork. For them, the branch was not a symbol of reliability; it was friction.

Open banking delivered the final blow

The Central Bank of Nigeria’s Open Banking framework was the decisive shift. Banks were no longer isolated systems. Customer data could move between institutions securely and with consent. Fintechs and third-party providers gained access to financial data that had previously been locked inside individual banks.

The consequences were immediate: loan approvals that once took weeks became instant. AI started suggesting and executing investment decisions. Salary processing and payments were settled in seconds without physical presence. The branch had been the gatekeeper to all of this. Open Banking made the gate redundant.

By the mid-2020s, banks were running hybrid models. Some branches were converted into advisory hubs for complex needs. Others were repositioned as digital experience centers. Most were quietly downsized or shut, with staff reassigned to mobile and digital operations. Customers barely noticed, because the alternatives were faster, cheaper, and more personal. Power in financial services had moved away from physical locations and toward data, APIs, and customer consent.

The ecosystem today (2035)

The financial ecosystem is unrecognisable from what it was a decade ago. AI now handles routine queries, loan approvals, investment advice, and payments around the clock. A single digital platform gives customers seamless access to multiple banks at once. Embedded finance has made banking a background function inside everyday apps: ride-hailing, e-commerce, and grocery deliveries. Personalised financial tools manage cash flow, spending, and investments in real time. People do not go to a bank.

Banking happens around them, continuously, without them needing to think about it. The social impact is just as significant as the technology. Customers now have real-time visibility into where their money is going, and financial literacy is better for it. Millions of Nigerians who previously had no access to formal credit or savings products now do so through a phone. High-net-worth customers manage their portfolios through AI. The branch is irrelevant at every income level, not just at the bottom.

What the branch’s decline taught us

The branch’s exit was not inevitable. It was the result of choices, made slowly and then all at once, by institutions that waited too long to change. Looking back, the lessons were clear.

Adaptation determined survival. Banks that built genuine digital capability into their core operations lasted. Those who defended legacy models did not. There was no middle ground.

Data outweighed real estate. The branch held value because it held the customer relationship. Open Banking proved that the relationship lived in the data, not the building. Whoever held consented customer data held the account, the loan, and the next decade of that customer’s financial life.

Customers did not leave the branch because digital technology existed. They left because the experience was genuinely better: faster, more convenient, and available on their terms. Technology alone did not drive the shift. A better product did. And AI replaced the teller function entirely.

Approvals, risk assessment, and reconciliation: all of it ran faster and more accurately than any branch operation had managed to. The teller was not made redundant by cost-cutting. They were replaced by a system that simply did the job better.

The branch closing was not the end of banking. It was a reallocation. Resources that had been tied up in buildings and headcount moved into technology, better products, and broader reach. The institutions that came to define Nigerian finance by 2035 were not simply the ones that went digital. They were the ones who used Open Banking to build something more trustworthy, more inclusive, and more useful than what existed before. That was the standard. Everything else was just infrastructure.

Anechile Okoaye is the Product Delivery Lead, Credit Direct.