> a new report suggests a way to add to its bottom line: offer banklike services, such as a check cashing card that would allow holders to make purchases and pay bills online or even take out small loans. The idea is to provide services that are now unavailable in many communities.
> ... for a while, [the Postal Savings System, established in 1910] was quite successful. "By the year of the Wall Street crash, 1929, they had $153 million on deposit. Postal savings banks were considered safe during the '30s when commercial banks were crashing." Rubio says their peak year was 1947 when they had $3.4 billion on deposit.
> But after World War II, banks raised their interest rates, making the 2 percent the post office was paying for savings less appealing. By 1967, the Postal Savings System was out of business.
The doubling of post systems as rural bankers in Europe has interested me for a while. Even today the basic bank services in Switzerland are done by the Swiss Post. It makes a fair amount of sense and there are some neat synergies. Even fairly small communities have a post office; postmen visit homes regularly and so can e.g. pay out cash pensions; sending out documents or valuable mail at a post office is intuitively similar to sending out money to pay bills; post has implicit identity systems to make sure mail gets to the right person.
It seems it wouldn't be very hard to adapt post systems to electronic age in most countries. It is basically accepted that electronic banking will verify identity by sending out mail (e.g. with login details) so the post is already involved to an extent.
> a new report suggests a way to add to its bottom line: offer banklike services, such as a check cashing card that would allow holders to make purchases and pay bills online or even take out small loans. The idea is to provide services that are now unavailable in many communities.
> ... for a while, [the Postal Savings System, established in 1910] was quite successful. "By the year of the Wall Street crash, 1929, they had $153 million on deposit. Postal savings banks were considered safe during the '30s when commercial banks were crashing." Rubio says their peak year was 1947 when they had $3.4 billion on deposit.
> But after World War II, banks raised their interest rates, making the 2 percent the post office was paying for savings less appealing. By 1967, the Postal Savings System was out of business.