Switzerland’s banks are synonymous with money – plenty of it – but cash transactions are now on the way out. Here’s why.
If you are accustomed to going to a bank’s teller window and dealing with a live person, get used to the new reality: withdrawing or depositing money at the counter is becoming rarer, and may soon disappear altogether.
That’s because many Swiss banks are increasingly directing their customers to ATMs or online services for transactions which used to be handled by employees.
Disappearing counters
This decline illustrates a profound shift in Swiss banking practices.
According to media reports, PostFinance and Bern Cantonal Bank are at the forefront of this trend: they no longer handle cash transactions at all.
At Zurich Cantonal Bank, staff only distribute cash in emergencies.
Switzerland’s largest bank, UBS, still maintains this service in half of its 190 branches, and Raiffeisen in a third of its 774 branches.
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Why is that?
Two reasons are cited for this growing trend.
One is less demand for physical counters: at Raiffeisen, for instance, the proportion of customers using these services has fallen from 46 to 15 percent in the past 10 years.
Secondly, there are fewer bank branches altogether: at the end of 2024, there were 2,476 of them in the entire country, a third fewer than a decade ago.
What does the future hold?
The University of St. Gallen uses current data to demonstrate the drastic nature of the decline.
It shows that the trend is continuing, with the number of branches – and cash services – likely to keep falling.
