"The Invisible Lifeline: Why Everyday Banking Must Be Treated as Critical National Infrastructure" (by Andra Sonea)

Fieldwork photo by the author (UK).

London has long been one of the world’s leading financial centres and the birthplace of a global fintech ecosystem. Even after Brexit, financial services remain a cornerstone of the UK economy, guided by some of the most forward-thinking regulators worldwide. One might assume, then, that access to basic banking defined as the ability to manage a current account, withdraw cash, deposit funds, and make payments, is a given. It isn’t.

In my PhD, Everyday Banking - A Critical National Infrastructure in Transition. The Case of Access to Banking in the UK, I argue that everyday banking is an essential yet invisible form of Critical National Infrastructure (CNI), one undergoing a poorly monitored and risky transformation. Using a mixed-methods approach, drawing from geography, spatial analysis, organisations studies and Science and Technology Studies,  this research reveals profound changes in the physical and digital landscape of banking access across the UK, uncovering critical vulnerabilities and laying bare an urgent need for new governance mechanisms.

A System in Slow Failure

While “Finance” is recognised as a CNI sector, this broad label hides crucial distinctions between component industries in terms of objectives, business models, risk and resilience profile. Everyday banking, the infrastructure behind current accounts and everyday transactions, is its own system of massive complexity, expected to function at low-cost, low latency, 24/7.

By framing everyday banking as an infrastructure that delivers essential services, we can better identify system-level failures and critically examine its dimensions of access, reach, and governance. This framework builds on the work of Susan Leigh Star and Paul N. Edwards on “reading” infrastructure, as well as on UK and EU policy frameworks for national infrastructure protection, universal service, and services of general economic interest.

Data assembled for this research shows a sharp decline in physical access points and a growing fragmentation of what remains. Many communities function in a paradigm that I term “spatial unbundling”: cobbling together access from pop-up post offices, temporary vans, or hybrid “branches” without staff, all points with irregular schedules and scattered in space. This patchwork reality contrasts starkly with the celebrated digital unbundling of fintech, revealing a widening gap between digital convenience and physical exclusion. In the background of this transformation there are other fundamental types of unbundling re-shaping the industry: the unbundling of money/payments and banking (Awrey, 2021) and the technology driven unbundling or modularisation (Sonea, 2018).

Measuring the Unseen

To accurately capture the state and dynamics of access, the thesis introduces several methodological innovations.

Capacity and Capability of a Point of Service. Traditional studies often treat all access points as equal equating their presence with full access. This thesis introduced the concepts of capacity (measured by weekly opening times) and capability (the range and type of services offered). Highlighting the misleading nature of simply counting physical points, the analysis showed that the reduction in overall capacity for providing banking services was significant.

The Void and Impact Index. The thesis calculated Euclidian distances to the first and second closest point of access to banking measured from the centroid of a small statistical area. It defined the Impact Index as the difference between these distance (D_2j – D_1j), indicating areas critically dependent on one single location. Furthermore, the study operationalised the concept of 'The Void' areas suffering from both physical and first-level digital access barriers, demonstrating that highly underserved areas could be identified even with simple thresholds.

Spatial Access Indicator (SPAI_i). The thesis proposes a flexible, gravity-based accessibility indicator (SPAI_i) adapted from Floating Catchment Area (FCA) methods accounting for population density, distance decay (using a bespoke step-reciprocal and cumulative gaussian impedance function), and service capacity, thereby allowing assessment of access by specific type of banking service (e.g., cash deposit).

Empirical Insights and Policy Urgency

These methods combined with field observation yielded empirical findings regarding the state of everyday banking access.

The research demonstrated empirically that the UK Government’s formal criteria for access to the Post Office network are not satisfied in Wales. This is significant as the Post Office is formally designated as the provider of universal banking services in the UK. For example, contrary to the expectation that 90% of the population live within one mile of a post office, the analysis found that only 72.43% of the population lived within one mile of a post office reachable by car and the percentage is only 68.70% if we consider only post offices open more than 34.5 hours per week.

The study also revealed that a significant proportion of the physical infrastructure for basic banking is no longer owned or operated by the banks themselves. This is important given that the UK banking industry regulation regulates institutions not services. It essentially means that the “last mile” delivery of basic banking easily escapes the regulator.

An important empirical finding regards the location information for the points of service. The Open Banking Branch Locator APIs mandated for the largest UK banks (CMA9) are objectively not fit for purpose for at least two reasons. First, they offer only an incomplete set of locations limited to the CMA9. Second, the definition of the APIs did not keep pace with the evolution of the network as it was revealed during field observation in South Wales. Inability to reflect irregular schedules, counter-less, cashless branch typologies lead to an overestimation of service availability and in practical terms leads to many wasted trips by those functioning in the spatial unbundling paradigm.

Conclusion

The thesis concludes that the UK is "sleepwalking into an unmanaged transition into a cashless society". The erosion of physical access points, combined with fragmented governance creates a state of 'organised ignorance' (Frickel & Vincent, 2007) or ‘strategic ignorance’ (McGoey, 2019) regarding the true accessibility of essential services.

There is an urgent necessity for the regulator to impose a binding requirement for the dynamic and accurate provision of location and service data (including capability and capacity) for every point of basic banking service across the UK. Digital solutions are not only for digital banking but also for building a comprehensive, integrated modelling and monitoring of this system. The study proposes spatial indicators which would allow the deployment of local mitigation solutions suitable to the communities affected. As a future step, the study also proposes the modelling of interdependencies of everyday banking to other critical infrastructures - the electricity grid and telecommunication infrastructures (Varga, 2022) in order to increase the resilience of the industry and protect the economy from the effects of cascading failures.