Retail banking hub network | Financial services
From Exit Surveys to a National Evidence Base
How Cash Access UK built the data infrastructure to understand what communities actually need — and earned a substantiated voice in the future of cash access.
+14k annual responses in 2025
51 Collectors across the UK
9× more responses
THE CHALLENGE
A growing network, a narrow window
When a bank closes its last branch in a town, the absence is felt immediately. Cash Access UK exists to fill that gap — a shared high-street presence, jointly owned by ten major retail banks, where customers can carry out everyday transactions and speak face-to-face with a representative from their own bank.
By early 2025, more than 80 hubs were open across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. But understanding what customers in those communities actually experienced — consistently, at scale, in real time — was a problem the organisation hadn’t yet solved.
Their existing approach: quarterly clipboard surveys at three locations, yielding around 1,500 responses every three months. Useful in isolation. Useless for spotting regional patterns, testing strategic hypotheses, or understanding how different communities experienced the service differently. A quarter was too long to wait. Three sites were too few to generalise from.
"Previously we had about 1,500 responses per quarter from three hubs. Now we're getting nearly 14,000 responses a year from across the whole country. That's a completely different scale of understanding."
WHAT CHANGED
51 collectors. One national picture.
Cash Access UK deployed Viewpoint kiosks across the full hub network — 51 kiosks, covering every nation. The survey design evolves as strategic priorities shift: different questions can be pushed to different locations, and an API integration feeds raw data directly into the team’s Power BI environment for analysis that goes beyond out-of-the-box reporting.
The result is a feedback infrastructure that works on two levels simultaneously: a steady operational pulse — monthly and quarterly MI fed to internal committees and external stakeholders — and a hypothesis-testing capability, where the team can design a targeted survey, deploy it, and have results within days rather than quarters.
RESULTS
Data that changed decisions
The increase in scale didn’t just improve reporting. It surfaced patterns that would have been invisible before.
Rota rebalancing
When a hub opens near a recently-closed branch, that bank’s customers concentrate heavily on the one day their representative is present. Queue frustration in certain hubs showed up clearly in the data — and gave the team the evidence to make the case for reviewing weekly rotas.
Service awareness gap
A significant proportion of customers didn’t know they could speak directly to a representative from their own bank — many believed hubs were primarily for cash. The finding drove improved communications, including additional information screens.
The printing pilot
Some customers asked for the ability to print statements and transaction records at the hub. The data supported a pilot recommendation — now underway in a selection of sites.
"We're trying to become a genuinely data-led company. The tablets give us 14,000 data points a year to inform strategic decisions. That wasn't possible before."
A voice in regulation
Cash Access UK now holds systematic customer evidence from across communities affected by branch closures. That data informs conversations with banks and the FCA — grounding advocacy in something more durable than anecdote.
WHAT'S NEXT
Building on the foundation
The immediate priority is expanding the hub estate. The marketing team is now exploring awareness questions — whether people in communities that have a hub actually know it exists, and whether there are potential users not currently accessing the service. It’s a further expansion of what the feedback infrastructure can answer.
The team is also piloting ViewPoint’s AI-powered query feature alongside their existing Power BI setup — with a goal of making insights accessible to anyone in the organisation, not just those who work directly with the data.
What began as a handful of clipboard surveys at three hubs has evolved into something more valuable: a national evidence base that gives Cash Access UK the standing to make the case — internally, to banks, and to the FCA — on what communities actually need.
Staying in Control Across Every Site
Live visibility across every location. Understand what matters most. Act with confidence
