In an era of greater digitalization and technology, it might appear that brick and mortar banks might well go the way of department stores. Everything can be done online. As bank branch closures hit an all-time high in 2020 and 2021, do banks still have branches anymore?
Today, we’ll show you how you can find trends in financial data without knowing SQL, and utilizing AI to write the tedious SQL for you. The power of Vanna lies in its ability to provide the answers to questions that are difficult or tedious to answer.
We obtained the financial data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) via Snowflake Marketplace. The FDIC publishes historical and current data on financial institutions in the United States.
We asked Vanna if it is true that banks are closing more branches than they are opening new ones. After all, banks like Chase argue that they now serve all states in the Lower 48, while others claim that bank branch closures are at an all-time high.
According to Vanna, JP Morgan Chase added 184 branches in 2022. Bank of America came in second at 63, and Fifth Third Bank came in third at 23.
What about the number of branches closed? Vanna has an answer as well. This can take the form of a chart, or a table for those who prefer text and grids to bars and lines.
Interestingly enough, it seems that there are more branches that were closed than there were opened in 2022.
Further, Vanna is able to reach across multiple tables in the same data warehouse to piece together the query we asked.
We could also dive in a little deeper and ask Vanna which state saw the highest number of branch closures that year. We could ask Google the same question, but it would give us headlines and not the detailed answers that we need.
It is interesting that Florida had the highest number of branch closures in 2022 and the states rounding up the top appear to be those from the East Coast as well!
From pesky date formats (just ask any data analyst what is the data type they dread the most) to piecing together information from different tables, this is just a short preview of what Vanna can do with your data. Connect with us to find out more!
