Retail banking strategy documents increasingly describe the branch manager role in the past tense — a position being phased out as digital channels absorb routine transactions. My research suggests this understates, considerably, the decision-making authority branch managers still exercise that digital channels simply haven't been given.
A branch manager resolves ambiguous situations constantly — a customer whose situation doesn't fit a standard product, a dispute that needs judgment rather than a script, a relationship that needs a human decision about flexibility. Digital channels handle routine transactions well and handle ambiguity poorly, because ambiguity is precisely the category of decision that's hardest to encode into a digital workflow.
The institutions reducing branch manager authority alongside branch footprint are, in effect, removing the organisation's capacity to resolve exactly the customer situations that digital channels can't — and then discovering, through customer complaints and attrition, that those situations didn't go away just because the branch network shrank.
This is a decision latency problem as much as a channel problem: the time between a customer's ambiguous situation arising and someone with sufficient authority actually resolving it. Branch managers historically closed that gap quickly, in person. Digital-first institutions frequently haven't built an equivalent authority structure for ambiguous cases, leaving customers stuck in queues designed for standard problems.
The branch manager role is genuinely changing. It isn't disappearing, and institutions that treat it as a legacy position to be phased out are likely underestimating how much unresolved customer friction that role is currently absorbing, quietly, every day.