Lloyds to Close Branches and Cut Over 300 Jobs

As part of an ambitious three-year project, Lloyds Bank will shut over 400 of its branches and reduced the size of hundreds more, moving away from traditional bank tellers and towards of tablet-based mobile staff. In a statement made to confirm the news, which will also means job cuts in certain central back office functions, the bank states: "Customers are increasingly choosing to use digital and mobile channels for their everyday banking needs. As a consequence, the number of customers visiting some of our branches has declined in recent years. In response to this, we have confirmed the locations of some branches which will close next year across Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland." In, February the bank announced plans to invest £3 billion ($4.29 billion) over the next three years to evolve the business from the traditional bank into a "digitised, simple, low risk, customer focused, UK financial services provider." In a schematic innovation presented alongside its yearly results, Lloyds promised to put forward new technology to push forth more operational efficiencies including more thorough end-to-end transformation targeting over 70 percent of the cost baseline. The £3 billion price tag is a 40 percent increase on the spending allowed for the prior three-year plan, which witnessed thousands of redundancies as the bank re-engineered its business to take advantage of new mobile and online platforms. The new plan is aimed at reducing operating costs to under £8 billion ($11.43) in 2020 and achieving a cost:income ratio in the low 40s.