With the announcement that more than one-quarter of its TD Canada Trust branches will be open on Sundays, Toronto-based Toronto-Dominion Bank has driven the final stake into traditional thinking about banker’s hours.

TD announced in mid-October that 300 of its 1,100 bank branches will be open for business seven days a week as part of a new schedule that includes a noon-to-4 p.m. shift on Sundays — a day that has never been a traditional part of the banking or financial advisory businesses.

TD’s move — the new longer hours go into effect in February — ratchets up the competition in the already hot retail banking sector.

“TD decided that we were going to compete on customer service, and so this is simply an extension of that,” says Barbara Timmins, manager of corporate communications with TD. “Our customer research told us this is what people want, and so we’ve tried to fill that need.”

Consider that it was only a few years ago that the banks were paring back bricks-and-mortar branch networks and hustling Canadians online — where banking could be done digitally.

So, why the shift back to the branches?

“There are a couple of things going on here,” says John Mac-Kinlay, partner in the consulting practice of Price-water-houseCoopers LLP in Toronto. “Over the past few years, we’ve seen a re-emergence of branches as a vital channel for sales and services.”

Essentially, banks realized that a large chunk of clients — most of them, in fact — still desire access to a bricks-and-mortar branch. And although some clients like online banking, many still want an in-branch experience.

This return-to-the-branch trend gained speed during the past decade as complicated products such as mortgages and lines of credit became popular. More and more clients dropped into branches to sit down with someone to get the details straight on these products.

“There are some willing to go online for everything, but that’s not the whole population,” says MacKinlay. “There is a recognition that certain products — such as mortgages and credit — are complex. Buying or selling a house today in Vancouver, Montreal or Toronto is almost a part-time job. It’s like selling a business. And so, branch visits have become more popular over the past couple years — at least, for the initial meeting.”

In such cases, clients want to have a conversation and “look someone in the eye,” says MacKinlay. “Some of the products are fairly in-depth, and so people want to come in to understand the interest rate implications and the complex parts of the contracts.”

On the other hand, the fact that many clients have embraced Internet banking probably has played into TD’s decision to be open seven days a week, as well.

Says MacKinlay: “In some sense, these [branch] hours are emulating the 24/7 nature of these other channels. We’ve had 24/7 online banking and call centres that are open all the time for years, so consumers have become trained to expect that kind of access. This is simply providing what people have come to expect from the bank.”

In a sense, seven-days-a-week banking is Internet banking coming full circle. But structural changes in the banking industry over the past decade also seem to be playing a role in the shift. In order to compete with non-traditional financial services players and rapidly evolving technology, bank branches need to stand out from the crowd by offering better service.

One U.S. study cites the example of a bank in New Jersey that bolstered its business by offering seven-day banking, along with extended hours, penny arcade-style coin-counting machines and restrooms for clients. In the five years after that program was rolled out, assets, loans and deposits have increased at annual rates of 37%, 27% and 39%, respectively — great business by any measure and seemingly confirmation of the soundness of TD’s recent move.@page_break@So, it’s no wonder so many banks are getting on board with weeklong hours. In the southern U.S., seven-day banking has become common at banks such as Capital One Financial Corp., which began offering weeklong hours in Texas in 2006.

The trend toward seven-day banking has also been picking up speed here in Canada longer than most people might think.

Toronto-based Canadian Im-perial Bank of Commerce first offered in-branch services on Sundays in 30 branches in southern British Columbia three years ago — and now has 48 branches across Canada open on Sundays in more than 30 communities, including Toronto, Ottawa, Victoria, Vancouver, Windsor, Ont., Kelowna, B.C., and Thornhill, Ont., among others.

“In addition,” says Kevin Dove, CIBC’s senior director of external communications and media relations, “more than 40% of our branches are open on Saturdays.”

In the case of CIBC, the extended service has been popular with small-business owners who like to be able to drop in anytime — as well as young professionals who like to access financial advi-sors on Sundays.

Toronto-based Bank of Montreal also has several branches open seven days a week.

However, it is the TD announcement — involving 300 of its branches — that takes the trend to a new, more mainstream level.

CIBC branches have long been open on Sundays with a full complement of staff on duty — both tellers and advisors. And that seems to be the plan at TD as well.

According to Timmins, whatever services a TD branch already offers on the weekend will be extended.

“Whatever is available on Saturdays,” she says, “we’ll offer on Sundays, too.”

TD will decide whether to hire additional staff after the new hours take effect.

In the U.S., TD has been billing itself as “America’s most convenient bank” — and it already has many branches open seven days a week. So, a similar move north of the border makes sense.

“That TD has done this is not surprising,” says MacKinlay. “It’s been very transparent about its desire to be convenient. That goes back through the Canada Trust legacy. It’s very consistent with the brand.”

The Sunday openings mean that TD branches will be open 50% longer than those of other banks — and as many as 72 hours a week longer than the competition, according to the bank’s statistics.

TD has selected the seven-day locations carefully, considering factors such as demographics and traffic.

TD has been a leader in customer service — and that’s long been represented in surveys. J.D. Power and Associates has ranked TD No. 1 in customer service five years in a row.

However, in an online survey earlier this year, TD gave up first place in customer service to Toronto-based Royal Bank of Canada — a break in the trend for TD.

“People use many channels today,” Timmins says. “The vast majority use multiple channels, so this is an extension of that. They are complementary. Obviously, we believe it will be profitable.”

The big question now is whether the remaining Canadian banks will follow, and begin to have their branches open seven days a week as well.

Says MacKinlay: “They’ll have to do their business case, but it will be interesting to see whether they do.” IE