From: Chris Blunt 
Newsgroups: uk.finance
Subject: Re: HSBC to cut 3500 jobs
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 18:54:22 +0800

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 12:16:41 +0100, "John Bishop"
 wrote:

>Why not go one further, scrap the call
>centres, and let people call their local branch? It used to work very well,
>and you dealt with people who knew you.

There's no reason why they couldn't do that, but would you be willing
to pay a the increase in bank charges to pay for the cost of the extra
staff and office space in UK branches to do that? I suspect their
research has shown that most of their customers wouldn't.