The Last Person in the Queue
When the system moves on without asking if you can follow
You’re reading The Ethical CTO by Neil Catton. These are articles that explore the human world and the intersection of technology, they try and ask difficult questions - not to scare - but to inform. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe free at neilcatton.substack.com.
A note on Margaret
Margaret is a fictional character. Her story is drawn from a combination of professional observation and personal proximity to real events. The experiences described are real. The person is not.
Margaret paid her own bills for more than forty years.
Not because it was easy, and not because she particularly enjoyed it. But because it was hers to do. She kept a folder in the kitchen drawer — statements, receipts, a running list of what went out and when. She knew her account number by heart. She had used the same branch for decades, long enough that the staff recognised her face if not always her name.
That branch closed three years ago.
By the time it closed, Margaret was already navigating something harder than a bank account. Her husband had died. The grief was sharp and particular, the way grief is when someone has been present in your life for long enough that their absence rearranges the furniture of every room. And alongside the grief, something else had begun, quietly, in the way that these things tend to begin, so gradually that it was easy to explain away as tiredness, or sorrow, or simply getting older.
Her memory had started to slip. Not dramatically. Not in ways that announced themselves. Just small surrenders, small confusions, small moments of uncertainty that would pass and then return a little more often than the last time. She managed. She adapted. She had always been someone who managed.
But the bank had moved online. And the version of Margaret the bank held in its system, the competent, independent woman who had never needed help, had not moved with her.
The letter arrived explaining that the branch had closed and that all services were now available online or via the app. It was a cheerful letter. It used words like ‘convenient’ and ‘flexible’. There was a QR code.
Margaret did not have a smartphone. She had a telephone, the kind that sits on a table and rings when someone calls. She had a television and a kettle and a folder in the kitchen drawer. She did not have a QR code reader, or a data plan, or the kind of easy familiarity with touchscreen interfaces that the letter assumed.
Her daughter set up online banking on a tablet. Sat with Margaret at the kitchen table and walked her through it. The password had to be eight characters, with a capital letter and a number and a symbol. It had to be something she would remember but could not write down. The security questions asked for her mother’s maiden name, the name of her first pet, the street she grew up on. Margaret answered them. But the answers she gave on one occasion were not always the answers she gave on another. And the system, which had no way of knowing that, simply rejected her.
The phone line was available Monday to Friday, nine to five. It routed through an automated menu. Option one. Option three. Please enter your sixteen-digit card number, followed by the hash key. If you have forgotten your card number, please press four. Margaret pressed four. She was asked for her mother’s maiden name.
Each attempt cost more than it should. Not in money. In something less measurable and more important. In the concentration required to follow the steps. In the anxiety that accompanied getting it wrong. In the particular weariness that comes from being asked to prove, over and over, that you are who you say you are, by a system that has no interest in who you actually are.
The system held a version of Margaret that no longer existed — the capable, independent woman who had opened the account. It had no mechanism for noticing that the person now trying to use it was the same woman, navigating different circumstances, in need of something different.
Eventually, her daughter took over the account. Not because Margaret asked her to. Because it had become the only way to make sure the bills got paid.
This is not a story about one bank, or one poorly designed app, or one family’s unfortunate experience. It is a story about a decision that has been made, across the entire UK banking sector, without properly accounting for the people it would affect.
According to data from Which?, banks and building societies have closed 6,694 branches since January 2015 at a rate of around 53 every month. That figure represents 68 per cent of the branches that were open at the start of that period. In 1986, there were more than 21,000 bank and building society branches across the UK. By 2024, there were fewer than 7,000.
The branch where Margaret was known, where a member of staff might have noticed that something had changed, is one of the missing 14,000.
The business case for these closures is coherent. Fewer people were visiting branches. Online and mobile banking had grown. The cost of maintaining a physical estate is significant. These are real considerations and the people who made these decisions were not indifferent to them.
But the business case was not the only case to be made. According to Age UK’s research, four in ten older people with a bank account in Britain, around 4 million people, are not managing their money online and are at significant risk of financial exclusion. Among those aged 85 and over, only 14 per cent bank digitally. The other 86 per cent were not consulted when the branch closed.
The assumption baked into every closure decision was that digital banking is a workable substitute for in-person banking for everyone, in every circumstance, at every stage of life. That assumption was always incomplete.
For people like Margaret, it has become impossible to sustain.
There is a word for what Margaret lost, and it is not ‘access’.
Access is a technical word. It describes whether a thing is available. Margaret still had access to her bank account, in the technical sense. The app existed. The phone line existed. The website existed. She could, in principle, use them.
What she lost was independence. The quiet, unremarkable, taken-for-granted ability to manage her own affairs. To know that her rent had been paid and her direct debits were running and her savings were where she had left them. That knowledge had been a form of dignity not visible to anyone else, not declared or measured, just present, like the folder in the kitchen drawer.
The loss happened gradually. A bill she was not sure she had paid. A direct debit that failed because she could not complete the verification step. A phone call from a utility company that frightened her, not because of what it said but because she could not remember whether the thing they were asking about had already been sorted. She stopped checking her balance because the process of checking had become a source of anxiety rather than reassurance.
Her daughter lives two hours away. She started making extra trips. Then she got access to the account. Then she started managing it entirely. Margaret knows this. She does not mention it. There is a particular shame in needing help with something you once did without thinking, and the system that created that need has no awareness of it whatsoever.
This matters beyond the individual. The FCA’s Consumer Duty, which came into force in July 2023, requires banks to deliver good outcomes for all customers, including those in vulnerable circumstances. The FCA defines vulnerability as a spectrum that includes cognitive impairment and life events such as bereavement — both of which describe Margaret’s situation precisely. Its own research has found that only 61 per cent of customers in vulnerable circumstances feel there are suitable ways to contact their provider. The regulation exists. The gap between what it requires and what Margaret experienced is wide.
There is a simple test I apply to any technology that is supposed to help people.
Does it adapt? Does it recognise who you actually are, in the circumstances you are actually in?
Does it assist? Does it make the thing easier for the specific person using it, not just for the imagined average customer?
Does it augment? Does it add something that was not there before, something real, rather than simply replacing a human relationship with a digital one and calling that progress?
Margaret’s bank fails all three. But the failure is not equal across them, and the order matters.
Adaptive is the root. The system was built with a static model of its customers. It holds a snapshot of who Margaret was when she opened the account and applies that snapshot, unchanged, to every interaction that follows. It cannot see that her circumstances have changed. It was never designed to look. A system that cannot see change cannot respond to it, which means that the more Margaret’s situation diverged from the person the system expected her to be, the more the system failed her. Not because it was hostile. Because it was blind.
Because it could not adapt, it could not assist. The demands it placed — the password rules, the security questions, the menu navigation, the verification steps — were calibrated for a customer in full command of their faculties, with a smartphone and a reliable short-term memory and the patience to try again if the first attempt failed. Margaret, on the day she needed her account most, was none of those things. The system did not notice. It simply declined her.
Augmentive asks what should have been there instead. The branch manager who knew Margaret’s name was not, as the business case described, a cost inefficiency. They were the adaptive layer, the part of the system that could see a person change over time and respond accordingly. They could notice that Margaret seemed confused today. They could offer to help without making it feel like an assessment. They could flag, quietly, that something might need attention. That capability was removed and nothing replaced it. Digital banking augmented the bank’s efficiency. It did not augment Margaret’s ability to manage her own life.
The branch manager who knew Margaret’s name was not a cost inefficiency. They were the adaptive layer. That capability was removed. Nothing replaced it.
Margaret’s story is not rare. According to Age UK, nearly 6 million people over 65 in the UK cannot use the internet safely or are not online at all. Among the oldest and most vulnerable, the majority are not banking digitally. The branch network that served them has largely gone. The replacements, banking hubs, Post Office counters, mobile branches, are welcome but patchy and still require a level of mobility and initiative that not everyone has.
So I want to leave you with four questions. Not rhetorical ones. Genuine ones, worth sitting with.
Does this story feel familiar? Perhaps it is your mother, or your neighbour, or someone you see at the Post Office doing something that used to happen at the bank. If it does, that familiarity matters. These experiences rarely surface in customer satisfaction surveys or digital adoption metrics. They accumulate quietly in the lives of people who have stopped asking for help because asking has become too hard. If you have a story, share it. The more visible these experiences become, the harder they are to ignore.
If you work in financial services or technology designing platforms, setting strategy, signing off on branch closure programmes, what would you do differently tomorrow? Not in the next product cycle. Tomorrow. The answer is probably simpler than the governance process that surrounds it. A phone line staffed by a person. A process for flagging customers whose circumstances have changed. A question asked, somewhere, before the branch closes: who is this hardest for, and what happens to them?
If you help someone else manage their finances as a family member, a carer, a trusted friend, do you know what the system provides for you? The FCA’s Consumer Duty exists. Third-party mandates exist. There are more options than most people are told about, because the system does not volunteer them. Knowing what is available is the beginning of being able to ask for it.
And finally, the bigger question underneath all of this. Was digital-first banking the right decision or did we confuse efficiency with progress? The branch closures reduced costs. They also removed something that had no line in the business case: the human relationship that could see a customer change. Rebuilding that from scratch, digitally, is possible. It requires designing for the person who needs help, not the person who does not. It requires asking, before the branch closes, who will be the last person in the queue and what happens to them after the doors shut.
Margaret still has a bank account. Her daughter manages it now. The folder in the kitchen drawer is still there. She keeps it because she always has, and because letting go of it would be one more thing, and she has already let go of enough.
If this piece resonated with you, I’d welcome your thoughts in the comments.
Neil Catton is the author of The Next Evolution, The Cognitive Crucible and The Shadow System, and writes at the intersection of technology, ethics, and human purpose.