The question is, are the elderly being swept away by change that has more to do with cost cutting than improving a service?

Take the case of the savings bank,  Cajamar which is closing its branches in two villages, mostly populated by elderly residents, in the Axarquía area of the province of Málaga, namely, El Borge and Iznate.

Let’s take the latter, Iznate, first. After protesting against the planned closure, the inhabitants had to accept a mobile bank that will visit only on Thursdays, and then from 08.00h to 14.00h.

Meanwhile, in El Borge, they rejected the mobile-bank option and are now bereft of even an ATM. Consequently, the Village Council is negotiating with Unicaja and independent ATM companies, offering them free, local space to secure a permanent machine.

But these villages are not the only ones having this problem in the area because other nearby towns are facing similar reshuffling of branches. Take the case of  Totalán which has been left with a 3-hour, weekly, mobile-bank visit, while Comares successfully negotiated a 24-hour ATM with limited in-person hours.

There are regional programmes like ATMs for Villages because there are over 43,000 residents in the province of Málaga suffering a risk of financial exclusion, defined as villages with over 500 residents lacking basic public banking or ATM amenities.

Editorial comment: so what can these villages do? Well, it would take a unanimous decision which would quickly make a main-street bank or savings bank change its mind, and that is if the whole village should threaten to close their account with the said entity and open one with a competitor. Now, if the majority are pensioners, who banks drool over because it is a steady income, the ultimatum would be a more effective one.

What we forget is that a foreigner in his or her early 70s grew up with the Stones, The Beatles, Rock & Roll and democracy. Spaniards in their early 70s grew up in an almost black&white Spain under the regime of Franco. Yes, there were cantautores singing protest songs about freedom like, Joaquim Sabina, Victor Manuel and several more, but there was also Mari Trini and her accordion singing ‘pajaritos por aquí.’ By the way, nobody sang about being free better than Nino Bravo, the Spanish Tom Jones. Let’s not forget, either, the Spanish group, Los Bravos with ‘Black is black I want my Baby back.‘

But I digress. Want I am saying is that a woman from rural Spain in her 80s probably only has very rudimentary writing & reading skills. Her generation signed official letters with a thumb print, which matched the one on her ID card.

In other words, the elderly Spanish pensioners might be your age, but they are from a different time period to the one you were born into. You might hand you mobile over to your grandchild to sort it out, but at least you are hanging on by your fingernails to the racing pace of technology — not so the elderly Spaniard, so taking their bank branch away is not a case of ,”Ah well, I’ll do it online,”or drive to the nearest ATM, either.

Does this sound patronising? It probably does, but I don’t mean to be. I’m just trying to point out how traumatic it is for these elderly villagers to lose their local bank branch.

(News: Iznate/El Borge, Axarquia, Malaga, Andalucia – Source: E. Cabezas)

Keywords: Village Bank Branches Closures, Cajamar, ATMs, Unicaja, Mobile Bank Branches

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