Madrid (EFE).- The First Vice President and Minister of Economic Affairs, Nadia Calviño, meets this Thursday with bank employers’ associations and with user associations to analyze the application of the Code of Good Practices to alleviate the mortgage burden of vulnerable families.
The minister will also meet with Carlos San Juan, promoter of the “I am older, not an idiot” campaign, and they will also analyze issues related to the financial exclusion of the elderly and residents of rural areas, reports the ministry.
Pilot program
In this context, the Bank of Spain is working with financial institutions for the “possible” launch of a pilot program that identifies the effectiveness of various alternative measures for access to face-to-face banking services in rural areas.
The “Occasional Document”, signed by five Bank officials, reviews the various initiatives deployed nationally and internationally to address the risks of financial exclusion and highlights that Spain has focused above all on financial agents, on mobile offices and in displaced ATMs.
The authors confirm that the digitalization process of financial services and the closure of branches have a direct impact on accessibility, more intensely among the elderly and residents of rural areas.
In their analysis of financial exclusion in different countries of the European Union (EU), they point out that the use of shared ATMs and post offices are the most widespread actions.
Multi-brand ATMs
Among the most widely used alternative means is the implementation of multi-brand ATM networks, which allow installation and maintenance costs to be shared among a group of entities in order to install them where their profitability is not guaranteed for a single entity.
Other options, such as offices shared by different entities (“bank hubs”), “cashback” (you buy in a store and withdraw cash at the same time, with which the store charges the purchase and the cash at the same time) and the “cash-in-shop” (withdrawing money directly at the store tills) are available in some countries but are mechanisms that are still little used.
The study authors point to Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK as frontrunners in addressing the lack of physical access to cash and other banking services.
Sweden is the only country where there is currently legislation in force on the minimum levels of cash access points because there the use of physical money is very small (barely 8%).
In the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) as a whole, cash was the most used means of payment in 2022, with 59% of transactions, although with different situations depending on the country. It reaches 75% in Malta and Slovenia, in Finland and the Netherlands it is at 20% and in Sweden, at the aforementioned 8%.
In the euro area as a whole, 65% of the transactions carried out by people over the age of 64 are made in cash, a percentage that drops ten points for those between the ages of 25 and 39.