TFA reasonably reduces to:

First, ATMs increased the demand for bank branches, which more than made up for the decrease in tellers per branch.

Second, mobile banking decreased the demand for physical branches.

There are ATMs not attached to bank branches. They could have replaced the branches with ATMs before. (I do wonder what bank tellers are doing these days. I mean actual tellers, not investment advisors and jobs like that.)

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bombcar 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They are handling in-person transactions, usually deposits (many who deposit checks manually still don't know how to use the app to do so, or if the branch has an ATM that does deposits).

They are the only way to get non-20 cash in many areas; the ATMs that can dispense other bills are quite rare. And if you want $100 in ones you're going inside.

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Poacher5 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They're basically bank receptionists for old people who will type details into the same system that the general public has access to. They also handle cash for small businesses (I worked in a cafe during university and we'd regularly have to do runs into town to deposit rolls of bills and get more change to float the till)

	▲	freediddy 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If that's all you think tellers are then you're missing out on a lot of opportunities. They are the first line of human-to-human contact with customers. They are able to sell new services or upsell existing services to customers, especially with the customer's data right in front of them. A new pleasant conversation plus "Oh by the way, did you know that you could get service ABC that would help you?" is something that an LLM or ATM can't do reliably. There's a tremendous amount of opportunity available with well-trained tellers.