5 October 2006
New figures from the British Bankers' Association (BBA) have discovered that the one million milestone for basic bank accounts has been reached.
Data from the BBA has shown that since April 2003, the number of basic bank accounts opened by people who were previously unbanked has reached one million.
The second quarter of the year saw a net total of 127,390 post office-accessible accounts opened and 36,541 existing accounts upgraded to fuller-featured accounts.
Banks were also offering basic accounts accessible through branches and ATMs a long time before the presence of Universal Banking. A net total of 641,857 such accounts have been opened while 174,868 have been upgraded since 2003 – with the total number of accounts standing at almost four million.
Ian Mullen, BBA chief executive, said: "We have now passed the one million accounts milestone in our commitment to the shared goal of making significant progress toward shaving the number of adults in households without a bank account by November 2006. We shall now build on this achievement in our continuing work to promote financial inclusion."
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