James Whitcombe

Background

James spent the early part of his career inside a UK high-street bank's branch operations function, which left him permanently sceptical of transformation plans written by people who have never stood behind a counter during a systems outage. His view is that branch networks aren't dying so much as being systematically misused — treated as a cost line to be minimised rather than a channel with a specific job that digital hasn't replicated.

He leads most of the firm's branch network restructuring engagements and works closely with Thomas Kessler's Operating Model practice on the decision-rights questions that branch strategy inevitably raises: who decides to close a branch, and on what evidence.