When the Bank Comes to You: Branch Network and Customer Multi-Channel Banking Behavior Completed Research Paper

摘要

Customers today increasingly interact with their banks using digital channels, lifting the necessity for banks to rethink the distribution of physical branches and customer behavior in a multi-channel environment. Using approximately 1.2M anonymized individual-level data from a large commercial bank in US over 6 years, our paper investigates the traditional channel - bank branches - and the impact of its network change (branch opening or closure) on customer multi-channel preferences and other banking behavior. Our results show that both branch opening and closure are associated with decreasing transactions through offline channels and increasing transactions in online banking. Hence, branch network change is likely to result in customer migrating from offline channels to online banking. In addition, we find that opening branch is associated with customers' adoption of additional banking products in a short term. Interestingly, closing a branch does not lead to more account closures by customers.