A person, please

What if tomorrow your bank made you sort out every problem with a chatbot? Imagine needing help with your account and having no way to talk to a person.

For many customers that is no longer a thought experiment. Spain had 45,707 bank branches in 2008 and 17,109 at the end of 2025, according to a study by Ivie, the Valencian economic research institute, for the banking associations. In 4,403 municipalities, home to about 1.6 million people, there is no branch left. For them, the phone line and the app are the branch.

The law has taken note of part of this. Ley 10/2025 rewrote the rules for banks’ customer service departments, and banks have until 28 December 2026 to adapt. On the phone and online, the customer must be able to ask for a person. A call does not count as answered unless they can say why they are calling and ask for one. Automated answering may not be the only channel. And service must be personalised: it must take account of the customer’s age, any disability, being a foreign national, where they live and their digital skills. The EU’s new payment rules, agreed in November 2025, point the same way: access to human support, not only chatbots.

It is part of what Carlos San Juan asked for. In February 2022 the 78-year-old from Valencia took 600,000 signatures to the Ministry of Economy. His campaign was called “Soy mayor, no idiota”: I am old, not an idiot.

Which brings up the question that matters. Does every customer need a person, all the time? Probably not. Most would never use one, and staffing every line all day is costly.

What a bank needs to know is narrower. Which customers struggle with the digital channels? On which journeys does automation fail? Where does the phone line stand in for a branch that no longer exists? And at what point does a chatbot stop helping and start to frustrate?

The bank already knows each customer’s age and postcode. What it does not know is where they gave up. Finding out is not complicated. Ask one short question at the end of each contact, on the channel used: did you get what you needed, and if not, what stopped you? Read the answers by group: age, a village with a branch or without, app or phone. And look at the calls where the customer asked for an operator, and at what they had tried first.

Within weeks the bank has a map: the journeys where older customers leave the app, the places where the phone line does the branch’s work, the step where the chatbot loses people.

The law spares banks the satisfaction surveys and annual audit it imposes on other large firms: those articles do not apply to the financial sector. Yet the banks’ own rules now call their service “evaluable” and personalised. That map is what both words mean in practice. It tells the bank where a person is worth paying for and where a better screen would do, and it is the evidence a bank will want if a supervisor, or a customer, asks whether its service was fitted to them.

The answer is not to go back to the branch network of the past. It is to understand customers better and offer each of them the channel they actually need. Going digital should not mean less attention. It should mean attention that is smarter, easier to reach and more human.

Carlos San Juan asked for humane treatment. The law now asks banks to offer a person. Knowing who needs one, and when, is still the bank’s own work.