Many of you will have noticed the proliferation of “Banking Hubs” around the UK, as banks close many of their traditional branches. These hubs are owned by a banking consortium called “Cash Access UK” who contract out the day-to-day management to the Post Office. These hubs are typically open Monday to Friday and provide a range of basic banking services for customers of all the major banks. In addition, up to five individual banks can provide a “Community Banker” that goes to the hub one day a week, to provide additional services to customers of that bank.
The question then arises as to how best to tag these banking hubs. Potentially we could have OSM objects for both the hub itself and the individual banks that send community bankers. I’d like to propose the following tagging scheme.
For the hub itself, either a node or area tagged with:
name=Banking Hub
amenity=bank
bank=banking_hub
brand=banking_hub
brand:wikidata=Q131824197
opening_hours=* (the full opening hours of the hub)
operator=Post Office Ltd
operator:wikidata=Q1783168
For each individual community banker presence, a node with the following tags:
name=<bank name> Community Banker
amenity=bank
bank=community_banker
brand=<bank name>
brand:wikidata=<bank wd id>
opening_hours=* (The day and opening hours for that community banker)
The rationale for tagging the banking hub as an amenity=bank is that it provides many of the banking services you would get in a regular branch, such as cash deposits and withdrawals. The rationale for having additional objects for the community bankers is that they provide additional bank-specific services on the day of the week that they’re present for customers of that bank. To capture this information and expose it to data-users with as little friction as possible, it’s would be easier to have a separate object for each bank, with that banks brand tags and the correct opening hours for that bank’s banker.
I’m also suggesting making use of the (currently little-used) bank=* sub-tag to specifically distinguish these ‘special’ types of bank from regular branches for anyone that wants to make use of information. I think it’s probably also useful to put “Community Banker” in the name of those objects to help distinguish them from regular branches.
There’s already an NSI entry for the Banking Hub objects, which includes the name, amenity and
brand tags I’m suggesting. It agreed, it would be good to get NSI entries set up for the community banker objects too - principally to avoid iD nudging users to make incorrect changes to them.
I’ve seen hubs with very different timetables. Also the hubs, or possibly the subbank, can be in a library. So I think that reality should represent that, even if it means a principle might not fit reality.
I don’t agree with having an individual node for each community banker in a Banking Hub - I don’t believe community bankers count as mappable physical features. I think we should come up with a solution that allows us to provide the information you’re trying to convey all within the one Banking Hub node.
For example, we could have a tag that lists the bank brands that operate here, for example banking_hub:brands=Barclays;Natwest;Santander
We could then come up with an opening hours tag for each individual community banker, for example opening_hours:Natwest=Th 09:00-17:00
Just some ideas for a different approach we could take instead of placing 7 amenity=bank nodes inside a single shopfront.
I get the impression that the level of service from the “core hub” may be quite variable, e.g. may or may not handle cash deposits / business accounts. The “community banker” component may be limited to a bank rep providing advice / online banking access rather than additional banking services?
@LordGarySugar That would indeed be an alternative way of recording the data. However, I don’t think it’s a good idea to create a new schema like this for what (on a global scale) is a very small set of data. First I think we’d struggle to get mappers to reliably implement it. The scheme would need communicating, and we’d likely not have editor presets to help nor any QA tools to monitor it. Secondly, while it would store the information, it’s unlikely that most data consumers would pick it up, since they’d need to add specific logic to their processing to deal with it.
(Your suggestion of opening_hours:Natwest is a nice illustration of one of the potential issues here. I’d say it should either be opening_hours:NatWest or opening_hours:natwest. Which-ever ones are wrong won’t be picked up by any data users that treat keys as case sensitive.)
So I think it would be far better to make use of existing tagging schemes and map the hub and community bankers as separate objects. While this might be a bit of a grey area for “One Feature, one OSM element”, I think the hub itself and the different community bankers are indeed separate features. I wouldn’t say that “feature” necessarily has to be something physical. The fact that you can’t discuss your Lloyds account with the HSBC banker makes them different features IMO. I think we’d be fine mapping a mobile bank banch that appears in a pub or car park one day a week as a separate object from the pub or car park. And a Post Office within a shop as a separate object from the shop. It’s not that different to be mapping different community bankers as separate objects from the banking hub that hosts them one day a week.
@phodgkin I’m not sure how much the individual services vary from hub to hub. I picked a few at random from Cash Access UK - Hubs and they all included the options to withdraw and deposit cash, pay in cheques, pay bills, and collect change (for business customers).
I guess that even if they share a desk they can be treated as bank open for one day a week? In the same way as place where during day you have greengrocer stand and during night you have fast food stand (and both appear reliably) you would tag both with own opening hours.
Though that makes sense if they provide bank-level service rather than “I can open and use bank app for you” type of service.
Perhaps not as much as I thought - I just found one banking website where it was a case of selecting the service you wanted and it then told you where you nearest suitable place was.
But here, for example, Banking Hub - Spennymoor
it is clear that all the basic services are provided by the “core hub”. But the weekly bank rep does seem to be more of a “friendly face / financial advisor” than a banker? It does seem different in nature to a conventional bank.