The new Chase bank branch in South Kansas City still smells of fresh wood. A deal is advertised in large letters on the spotless windows to lure people in: “Open an account here and get $400 immediately!”
The location has been open for three weeks, in a city where there are already quite a few bank branches. Inside, a friendly banker (he is not formally allowed to talk to the press, his name is known to… NRC) that he just happened to be calculating out of his own curiosity how “overbanked” the Kansas City region is.
He pushes forward a post-it with notes. “There are 15,000 customers in one location in the city.” According to him, the national average is closer to 30,000. And yet Chase is enthusiastically opening new physical locations here in the region.
In the Netherlands and large parts of Europe, banks have been closing their local branches for years and services have shifted to apps and websites. Over the past decade, the number of bank branches decreased by 40 percent, according to consultant Accenture. In the Netherlands, a thousand offices closed in ten years, it counted F.D. But in large parts of the United States, the exact opposite is happening. Banks are flooding many states with new branches.
Earlier this year, Chase, the consumer arm of banking giant JPMorgan Chase, said it wanted to open more than 130 new branches in various states by 2026. That billion-dollar investment (an exact amount has not been disclosed) is part of a longer-term plan to open more than 500 locations and hire 3,500 people through 2027. The bank is also renovating hundreds of branches.
Competitor Bank of America also opened dozens of locations in the US in 2025 and wants to continue doing so in the coming years. Since 2016, it has invested $5 billion in physical locations. A number of smaller banks are doing exactly the same. Although the total number of physical bank locations in the US peaked around 2008 and then began to decline, it is now rising again in some states.
A new Chase branch is opening soon.
Photo Milo van Bokkum
The fact that banks do this largely has to do with psychology, says Michael Abbott, head of the banking department at consultant Accenture. “Our research consistently shows – and it has also really surprised me – that two-thirds of people want a physical location nearby when they open an account with a bank.” This also applies to young people, according to Abbott.
When it comes to money, people want “someone they can turn to.” “The paradox is that they don’t even necessarily go to the location,” says Abbott. It’s more of a sense of security, he says.
That’s what the banks themselves say. According to JPMorgan Chase, the bank density they have is highly correlated with the number of accounts. It’s a “critical part” of gaining market share, said Jennifer Roberts, the bank’s head of consumer banking. rather against the Financial Times. At local bank Huntington they also notice that new customers who open an account digitally often live near a physical location, said financial director Zach Wasserman in the same article.
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Pets
The fact that Chase wants to cultivate a feeling of safety, warmth and familiarity is also evident in the new location in Kansas City (which is located right next to an existing US Bank branch). In the middle of the otherwise rather austere business there is a sign with “pets we love”. Customers can stick a note on it with information about their pet (there are four, but one is a stone).
Chase says it hopes the locations will be profitable within four years, but in many cases this will happen sooner. For a brand new location, the crowd in South Kansas City this afternoon isn’t bad. Due to the sensitivity of banking matters, most customers do not want to give their names, but in the parking lot they say that they are coming, for example, for a conversation about investing, to pay a credit card bill or to inquire about loans for their business.
A man who arrives in a pickup truck and introduces himself as Pat specifically complains about how annoying it is to do everything online. Nate Loontjer (46) is one of the few visitors who wants to give his name („very Dutch“, he mentions that last name). He is enthusiastic about the new location. “When I saw that this was being built I thought: cool,” he says next to his Corvette.
He is already a Chase customer, but now doesn’t have to drive as far to withdraw money – in the US you often have to pay to withdraw money at a bank where you are not a customer. Although the use of cash is also declining in the US, it is still much more widespread than in large parts of Western Europe.
Competition and optimization
Why does the US differ from many other Western countries, where bank branches are slowly disappearing from the streets? One of the reasons seems to be that the US has many more diverse banks – there are more than 2,000 of them, including many local ones – and they therefore have to fight more for customers. But Accenture’s Abbott also warns against making the difference between the US and, for example, Europe too great. Ultimately, the number of banks in America also fell by about a quarter over the past decade.
“What is happening now also has to do with optimization. For example, a bank may have too many locations in the New York region and branches there are closing.” But there are many places where banks still see room for growth, for example because they have little market share or the population is growing – and then opening a location can work well.
The next Chase in the region will soon open, a branch in southern Lawrence, a town not far from Kansas City – the vacancies can already be found online. There are already three other bank branches within a radius of one kilometer.
