Those who live in the city have made immediacy almost a necessity, but in small towns, at the foot of the mountains like in Llaurí, the rush goes at a different pace. It is Friday in the main square and a group of older people sit, waiting, in the shade of a mulberry tree, for the arrival of the bank. Around noon the Caixabank bus appears and its driver parks in a shady area next to the wall of the church. He opens the awning, mounts the ladder... The first to climb is a man who had started to queue as soon as the vehicle appeared on the street.
Llaurí is one of the 70 municipalities at risk of financial exclusion in the Valencian Community in which two Caixabank mobile offices provide service. This town in the Ribera Baixa is one of those small towns, with just over 1,100 inhabitants, in which financial institutions have been disappearing. A Caja Mar office remains open, a few meters from the Town Hall and very close to this square, which operates three days a week. This Friday it is closed.
"This is sometimes third world, what are we going to do?" says a woman who is waiting in line to get on the mobile bank that visits the town every two weeks. She boasts of, even so, carrying 200 euros on her, "for whatever may happen." Next to her, another neighbor explains that she normally asks her children to get money from her "in the capital", but admits that her forecasts were tight this week... "I fell short, so here I am. Although I really do everything I pay with a card. Everything except the butcher shop," he explains.
In this type of office, clients, and non-clients, can carry out the most common banking operations such as cash withdrawals, deposits or the payment of bills and taxes. Also the collection of the pension, an especially relevant management if one takes into account that 70% of the users served are over 70 years old.
The Llaurí bus arrives from Riola, a nearby town. "The bus route depends on demand," explains Rosa Piqueras, commercial director of CaixaBank in the southern area of the Valencian Community, who adds that it is the city council in question that communicates with the entity and then advertises the services on its channels. arrival dates and times of the bank office on wheels. "They can also operate at the ATM, but normally older people come and they prefer a colleague to assist them and explain things personally," says Piqueras.
The closure of bank offices in recent years has been intense and in small municipalities like Llaurí it means that the clients of this entity do not have a reference office if they do not travel three kilometers to Corbera. The service offer is linked in this case to the fact that almost half of the population is a client, "and logically they need us," adds Piqueras, who values the "commitment" to the entity's senior group.
In the Valencian Community, in September 2008, there were 5,069 open bank offices; in December 2021, a total of 1,800. A drop of 64.5%, which translates into 3,269 fewer offices, and the second highest in the entire State. Catalonia, with 5,840 offices missing, is the first.
These are data from a recent study by the Valencian Institute of Economic Research, which estimates that, after the closures of branches, 54.4% of the 8,131 municipalities in Spain have been left without any bank office. According to it, in the Valencian Community there are 22 municipalities with more than 500 inhabitants without access points to banking services. In total, there are 128 municipalities and population without an office, ATM, commercial agent, Post Office, or mobile office like the one mentioned in this article.
These are very small towns in which a total of 1,555,688 inhabitants live, 3.3% of the total. In fact, with data from the Bank of Spain, in all the autonomous communities without exception the branch network has decreased, with a range of variation that oscillates between a maximum of 71.7% in Catalonia to a minimum of 36.9% in Castilla la Mancha.
The text of the Valencian Anti-Depopulation Law, approved in extremis at the end of the legislature, establishes that financial entities that operate in the Valencian Community, in their commercial and financial function strategies, must take into account, among other means, offices , ATMs, financial agents or mobile offices, with which to provide solutions to those municipalities that do not have access to these services, in order to guarantee access to banking services for all people regardless of their place of residence.
But before its approval, in 2021 the Consell created a program, financed with nearly 8 million euros, to install ATMs between 2022 and 2025 located in population centers in the Valencian Community. The standard also includes this measure as a way to ensure financial inclusion in depopulated areas. Caixabank currently manages the program and has installed a total of 135 ATMs, one of them in Llaurí.
Meanwhile, in the town square they assume that this "is not what it used to be" and that it is normal to ask children and nephews to bring them money from the city when they pass by: "My daughter lives in Benetússer, there is full of banks," says one woman in a low voice... "Sometimes we look like a dormitory city," says another. "Don't say that, girl, life is good here."
