This year SBS has explored our view of what the branch of the future could look like for building societies: community hubs, mobile colleagues, and pop-up branches in shared local spaces. The vision is now well rehearsed, and evidence is strong. The Building Societies Association's recent research valued the branch network at £7.6 billion of social value a year. Leadership teams now face the challenge of not just how they will reimagine the branch to personalise to their member community, but also how to deliver it.

SBS research in April 2026 found that 85% of consumers would use an in-person service if their provider made it more accessible. Demand is evolving, not disappearing. What stands between the current branch format and a modern, flexible branch model is rarely strategy. Instead, it is the technology beneath the counter.
 

The appetite is proven. Delivery is the hard part

More than 6,600 bank and building society branches have closed since 2015. However, building societies have not closed branches at the same rate as banks and now account for around a third of all remaining branches, up from roughly 14% a decade ago. This is a genuine differentiator for societies, and members celebrate it.

But a market differentiator is only durable if it can be delivered flexibly and affordably. Opening more traditional branches, in the traditional way, is neither. The reimagined models this series has described all share one requirement: a service that is free to move. That is exactly what most branch systems were never built to allow.
 

The building is the constraint, not the branch

Legacy teller infrastructure was designed for a different era. It assumed high volumes of routine transactions, processed at a fixed counter, and on hardware kept on site. Every one of those assumptions now works against flexibility. Service is tied to a building because the technology is.

The cost of that constraint is significant and often hidden. Deloitte notes that maintaining ageing core systems is becoming steadily more difficult and expensive, as support contracts expire and the specialists who understand older platforms retire. Those that have attempted to lead the charge and worked on standing up a community hub or equipping a mobile colleague, have experienced that with legacy tech this is a slow, costly project. The estate dictates the strategy, when it should be the other way round.
 

Decoupling service from the premises

The shift that makes the “everywhere branch” possible is moving branch servicing off fixed, on-site infrastructure and onto a cloud-native, tablet-based platform. Once service lives in the cloud rather than the counter, location stops being a limiting factor.

The same capability can then run wherever a member needs it, whether the workstation is a permanent branch, a shared space in a library or community centre, a colleague's visit to a care home, school or workplace, or a pop-up at a local market. It becomes one system, deployed in many forms, rather than one locked to one place. This matters because the value the BSA identified flows from human interaction, from staff who know members by name and can pace a difficult conversation. Freeing colleagues to have those conversations and more wherever members are is the whole point.
 

Consistency, compliance and control, wherever the colleague sits

Flexibility must not become fragmentation. This is the concern that rightly occupies technology and executive leaders. Taking service out of the branch cannot mean weaker oversight, inconsistent advice or gaps in compliance.

A modern platform is what makes distributed service safe. The same workflows, embedded UK compliance and record of every interaction, apply whether a colleague is at a counter or a kitchen table. That control matters more than ever. The FCA's Financial Lives research found that 49% of UK adults show at least one characteristic of vulnerability, and Consumer Duty expects firms to identify those needs and evidence good outcomes at the point of service. A single, consistent platform makes that achievable everywhere, not only in the head office's line of sight.
 

The leadership decision

The “everywhere branch” is no longer a question of imagination. The models are understood, the demand is proven, and the social value is measured. What remains is a decision for technology and executive leaders. Should the systems beneath the branch support the ambition above it. For many societies, the honest answer is not yet.

This is where SBS can help. SBS Digital Branch is a cloud-native, tablet-based branch servicing platform, built in partnership with UK building societies, that replaces legacy teller systems and supports branches, mobile colleagues and pop-up formats from one solution.

To see what this looks like in practice, join our webinar, Reimagining the branch: bringing human advice into the digital age, on 22 September, with the BSA's economist and Marsden Building Society's Chief Customer Officer, on how societies can build flexible, human branch networks without unsustainable cost.