In Banking, Americans Lean Local

by. Bill Hogan

I won’t tell you the name of my bank, but I will tell you this: it’s the oldest in the state; it didn’t use account numbers until the Federal Reserve forced it to; and every employee at the branch I use — from manager to teller — knows me by name.

Not only that, the tellers all have baskets of lollipops and bags of dog biscuits at the ready, and if you have any kind of problem or complaint — as I did when the bank installed a coin-counting machine that automatically deducted a 3 percent fee for what tellers do for free — you can get a vice president on the phone in maybe a minute. (The machine disappeared sometime after I e-mailed him a Wall Street Journal article that pointed out how often such machines are inaccurate.)

I found this little institution after my original bank was swallowed up a bigger bank that was in turn swallowed up by a yet bigger bank. Smaller, at least for me, worked better.

Now comes a survey that shows I’m not alone. Overall, it found that 41.2 percent of respondents prefer local community banks, 34.4 percent credit unions, 22.9 percent national banks and 1.5 percent “other.”

I have the most company, it turns out, among people 65 and older; 50.5 percent of them prefer local community banks to national banks or credit unions. I have the least company among 18- to 34-year-olds; only about 33.5 percent of them prefer local community banks.

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