Despite predictions that brick-and-mortar bank branches would be rapidly declining in this online era, the number of bank locations in Arkansas actually increased over the last budget year. Arkansas Business Editor Gwen Moritz wrote about that in this week’s issue, which was released Monday.
Like ink-on-paper publications, brick-and-mortar bank branches are taking much longer to die out than predicted when the millennium was new. In Arkansas, in fact, the number of new bank offices appears to have popped up in the past 12 months after a decade in which the count declined by more than 10 percent. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. website listed 1,385 bank offices in the state as of June 30, a figure that included full-service branches and limited-service locations like loan production offices. That’s 40 more than the FDIC’s snapshot of deposits found on June 30, 2017. Nationally, more than 1,100 new branches were opened in the same 12-month period, although that does not represent a net change in the total.
You can read Moritz's story here, or listen to the interview with KUAR that aired during Morning Edition above.
