Shared banking services: evaluation of a pilot service

Shared Banking Services was a pilot scheme run by the British Bankers' Association and the four main high street banks (Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds TSB and NatWest) which started in January 2002 and ran until December 2002.

The pilot allowed personal and business customers in ten locations across England and Wales to undertake basic banking services through another participating bank's branch. These services were available to personal customers free of charge.

The overall aim of the study was to evaluate the pilot. More specifically, the study:

• Compared the characteristics of users and eligible non-users of the new service and examined how far the new service was being used by groups that were identified in an earlier study Banking Without Branches as facing the greatest difficulties if they were remote from the nearest bank branch.
• Explored why non-users had not used the pilot service and how they met their banking needs.

The study considered personal customers and small businesses separately.

The evaluation involved three inter-linked stages. It began with two parallel postal surveys of a sample of eligible users of the pilots (i.e. users and non-users), one of personal customers and one of small businesses. This was followed by 40 depth interviews with non-users, again including both personal customers and small businesses. Finally, interviews were held with staff at each of the ten pilot sites.

The research began in August 2002 and was completed in the Spring of 2003.

Shared banking services - evaluation of a pilot service (PDF, 311kB)