A bank is a business, and like any other business they buy things, they value-add things, and they sell things.

The only difference between a bank and most other businesses is that banks both buy and sell money. Customers lend the bank money (though deposits), the banks lend others money (through housing loans, investment loans and suchlike). The banks add value through assessing and handling those loans (and also taking on risks with that money), and re-lend it.

To suggest that a bank has no right to make profits is about as sensible as saying that no business has a right to make profits. To suggest that banks are evil because they are profit driven is like saying that all businesses are evil because they are profit driven. To suggest have a social obligation is no different to saying that any other business has a social obligation.

At the end of the day there is a system in which banks (like every other public company) are run by staff who have an obligation to their shareholders to make as much money as possible, and who will be replaced by those shareholders if they do not do so.

If the banks are to do things which do not increase their profitability, such as giving subsidies to pensioners, providing staff in cases where machines are more efficient, or leaving remote and inefficient branches open because it conveniences the rural sector, then the government must make laws to force them to do so.

The economic rationalists and free marketeers will say that this is a pointless exercise, because the most good will be done for the most people by letting the market do its job, but this is just opinion. Nonetheless, stopping the banks from this kind of cost cutting is just neo-luddism

Branch closures and replacement of tellers with withdrawal machines and Internet sites is inevitable.

Some people believe that banks have a community service obligation (CSO) (eg to provide 98% of pensioners with free human teller service with a travel + waiting time of 30 minutes). A far more sensible way to do this through defining what the CSO is, and tendering it out. It least then it is possible to understand what the real cost of providing the CSO is.