M&S Bank closes all customer current accounts and scraps all in-store branches

Marks & Spencer is scrapping all M&S Bank customers’ current account and closing all in-store branches as it dramatically scales back its financial arm.

M&S, which launched its banking service in 1985 and has been running it as a joint partnership with HSBC since 2004, has informed all its customers that their current accounts will soon be closed.

The embattled high street giant also announced that it will close all 29 in-store M&S Bank branches this summer, The Telegraph reported.

While M&S says its plans to keep all of its in-store travel money desks open, its banking arm will now focus largely on credit cards and store rewards, having scrapped new home loans last March.

READ MORE: M&S expands digital contactless click & collect service with Doddle

It comes amid an indepth overhaul of M&S wider operations, as it looks to cut costs and transition to a more digital model in the wake of waning sales, even before the pandemic.

Last month M&S chief executive Steve Rowe warned that he would be forced to let thousands more staff go if the government did not reform the UK’s business rates system.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, he said “seismic upheaval” caused by the Covid-19 pandemic would lead to doom and gloom on the high street unless the “unbearable yoke” of business rates undergoes a “fundamental review”.

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5 Comments. Leave new

  • Not to mention the 300+ redundancies!!!! Which fails to get a mention!!

    Reply
  • Graham Price
    March 7, 2021 8:08 am

    M&S should have stuck to what they know selling food and clothes not tread on other industry where they are totally useless and couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery.

    Their customers now have to find another provider.

    Reply
    • HSBC is Hong Kong and to do with China, it’s not a moral bank. People should change their bank and the energy under M&S I got vouchers and lost them from a handbag, I didn’t like not having a card or a way to spend them. The loyalty card was ridiculous I cancelled it. They sell too many sweets and things near the tills unlike Co-op who are better. I got more off their loyalty card and they are cheaper and healthier. M&S should sort their clothes out the only part I really like mostly. I like some of M&S food but not all of it

      Reply
  • An amazing organisation who ‘hides itself’ away despite being light years ahead of any other retailer in the UK and possibly Europe. M&S has continuously lacked foresight to promote and advertise how ‘green and sustainable’ they are, especially their greatest potential shoppers – the millennials – who only want sustainable and traceable product, but are completely unaware M&S have it already in bucket loads! It is M&S top management who got lost many years ago in their self importance to drive and to make suppliers jump through all the Plan -A hoops – A type of unique self importance which has cascaded down and become embedded with middle & lower management – so the continuous failure to promote and sell their USP and benefit of Plan-A, to drive customers to their product is completing the downfall. And so the company again contracts with it loosing banking…… what is next…..
    Digital is important but not the most important for M&S but the ‘self important’ don’t see that – Primark do pretty well without an amazing digital platform, they attract sales through customer awareness of their product and price and now only starting to look at digital – M&S could take a leaf out of this book or maybe they are too self-important ?

    Reply
    • Indeed but the problem they have is their card isn’t sustainable, HSBC aren’t an ethical bank and their products too much plastic waste. Even they still have plastic bags!

      Reply

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