The government has admitted that just 1.4% of businesses that enquired about its coronavirus business interruption loan scheme (CBILS) have so far been successful.

Almost three weeks after the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, first launched the scheme to help small and medium-sized businesses with loans and other financing of up to £5m each, it has emerged that just 4,200 of the estimated 300,000 firms that sought help online have received rescue loans.

Tens of thousands of firms are understood to have made formal applications, but amid accusations of excessive bureaucracy and a reluctance among lenders to make loans, only a fraction have been given the go-ahead.

Alok Sharma, the business secretary, revealed the lack of progress as pressure mounted on officials and leading banks to speed up the processing of loan applications before thousands of businesses go bust.

Rural communities across the country know all too well the damage that bank branch closures are causing. However, a growing number of villages and small towns have seen little-known providers step in to fill the breach after Britain’s largest banks have fled.

Hawes is a picturesque town in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales, most famous for being the home of Wensleydale cheese. The community was rocked when its two bank branches, a Barclays and an HSBC, closed their doors. This meant residents faced a 33-mile round trip through winding country lanes to their nearest bank in Leyburn.

But the community fought back and mounted a successful campaign to bring banking services back. Newcastle Building Society officially opened a branch in the town on Thursday, meaning small businesses and residents are not cut off from their money after being left in the lurch by the big banks….

Lloyds Banking Group is closing 56 more branches this year, blaming “changing customer behaviour” for the decision.

The group will shut 31 Lloyds, 10 Halifax and 15 Bank of Scotland branches between April and October this year.

Many of the big banks have been slashing their networks on the grounds that customers are spurning traditional branch counter service in favour of doing their banking online and via mobile phones.

However, the consumer organisation Which? said: “The loss of yet more branches to an already devastated network will hit communities across the UK hard, as there is still a clear demand for access to traditional banking services and cash.”

It is understood the Lloyds group has closed a net 655 branches since 2010.

A bank spokesperson said: “We are committed to having the largest branch network in the UK and, in addition to our branches, all our customers can also use the Post Office to access their banking locally, alongside our mobile branches which visit many rural communities.” The bank said the latest cuts were in response to “changing customer behaviours and the reduced number of transactions being made in branches”.

The bank said it would aim to avoid compulsory redundancies by seeking redeployment in the first instance and then offering voluntary redundancy.

In recent years, Lloyds Banking Group has been reorganising its branch network. It has shrunk some of its existing high street outlets and turned them into “micro-branches” that do not have traditional counters. At the same it has unveiled large flagship branches with facilities such as an in-house coffee shop and dedicated business hub.

Free-to-use cash machines are vanishing more quickly in deprived areas than in affluent ones, new research shows.

Which? said its analysis shows nearly one in 10 free cashpoints across the country had closed or switched to fee-paying during a 17-month period after changes to how the network is funded were set out.

Reductions to the fees card issuers pay to ATM operators have sparked fears that “cash deserts” could be created, with bank branches also closing.

Looking just at the numbers of free ATMs which had been converted from free to fee-charging, Which? found that the most deprived areas across the UK had seen a reduction of 979 free-to-use machines – equivalent to 5.7 per cent of their ATM network.

Assembly research shows more than 200 banks have shut in Wales since 2008, leaving towns such as Newcastle Emlyn and Hay-on-Wye without any.

Banc Cambria would work like a regular bank, with branches across the country, but would be owned by its members.

First Minister Mark Drakeford pledged to set up a community bank in his Welsh Labour leadership campaign.

The Public Bank for Wales Action Group, working with the Community Savings Bank Association, wants to fill gaps left by the departing high street banks.

Banc Cambria board member Mark Hooper told BBC Sunday Politics Wales: “You will be able to have a current account, businesses will be able to have accounts, there’ll be mortgages provided so people will be able to buy homes.

“We’ll also be making sure there’s a superb online presence – people like using their apps. It will be in Welsh and English.”

Mr Hooper hopes for Welsh Government support and wants to be able to start talking about its first investor soon, as it continues to seek funding.

It would then be able to set out a timescale for applying for a banking licence and opening the first branches.

Royal Bank of Scotland is aiming to wind down the remainder of about £1bn in controversial bank loans held by local authorities across the country, after criticisms that high payments have diverted cash from council services.

Campaigners have welcomed the move, which followed similar efforts made by Barclays in 2016 and comes as both lenders face a string of lawsuits.

The loans have been criticised by activists and the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, who said councils have been on the hook for expensive interest payments that could have been diverted to local services already squeezed by spending cuts. Campaigners against the loans estimate that the cancellation of so-called lender option borrower option loans, or lobo loans, could ultimately save taxpayers £16bn over the next 40 years.

The Guardian understands that RBS is working to wind down the loan portfolio by the end of the year. The main way it is doing this is through loan redemptions: allowing clients including local authorities to pay back the loans earlier than their original contracts allowed, with some offered a discount on their repayment as an additional incentive

Consumers in rural areas of the UK are far less likely to use their smartphones for banking than their urban counterparts, a survey says.

The findings, from the UK’s financial regulator, are set to reignite the debate over bank branch closures – particularly in rural locations.

However, its report also suggests that those in rural areas are more satisfied with their financial circumstances.

The Financial Conduct Authority also exposed a north-south savings divide.

The data comes from a renewed assessment of a survey of 13,000 people’s financial lives by the FCA.

The survey, first published in October last year, found an estimated 4.1 million people are in financial difficulty due to missed domestic or credit bills.

An older population and patchy broadband and mobile coverage will be among the reasons for a take-up rate of just 23% in mobile banking and a 54% take-up of internet banking in rural areas, compared with 45% and 78% respectively in urban areas.

The report also reveals there is greater reliance on bank branches in rural areas, but also more difficulty in reaching those branches owing, in part, to health conditions.

The announcement came 24 hours after HSBC said it would be shutting another 62 branches this year, on top of 55 already earmarked for closure.

The Yorkshire, Britain’s second largest building society, will quit the current account market in order to concentrate on mortgages and savings. It will also ditch the Norwich & Peterborough brand from the high street, having taken it over in 2011.

The society said the moves were designed to deliver better long-term value to its 3.3 million customers. The group aims to close 20 Yorkshire branches in May, and 28 N&P outlets from September. This would reduce the total number of branches and agencies from 308 to 260.

Chief executive Mike Regnier said: “We believe operating with Yorkshire building society as our sole high-street brand would allow us to run the business more effectively and efficiently, enabling us to deliver better products and services for our members.”

He added that customers’ increasing enthusiasm for running their finances via the internet and mobile phones was a key factor in the move. “We therefore no longer believe it is the right commercial position for us to continue to maintain these 48 branches across the N&P and Yorkshire network.”

Challenger bank Handelsbanken is opening its 200th branch in the UK, doubling its size in just three years and becoming one of the fastest growing players taking on the big high street brands.  The rapid growth has taken place in part because of the strong financial position of its Swedish parent group, which has few capital constraints on expanding in Britain. But it has also come despite Handelsbanken spending next to nothing on marketing; it does not even have a central marketing department. The bank’s unconventional approach also extends to its growth prospects, with chief executive Anders Bouvin saying he has no concrete targets. “We don’t do fixed planning at all, I have no plan. But the way things look now we will continue to go along this path for the forseeable future. I cannot see why at this stage we would want to change anything,” Mr Bouvin said

This approach to organic rather than planned growth suggests a very different approach to our normal deterministic and often flawed way of doing things!

Britain’s 46 million current account holders will be bombarded from Monday with offers to switch banks thanks to the formal introduction of “seven-day switching”, after a £750m systems overhaul to ensure direct debits and payments can be transferred between providers in the space of a week.

Three-quarters of current accounts are still held by the “big four” high-street banks, with the typical customer staying with a bank for 17 years – six years longer than the average length of a marriage. Fears of payments going awry has discouraged most customers from moving, even if they have endured poor service. A recent survey found that one in five people would rather go to the dentist than try to switch their current account.

But starting from Monday, 33 bank and building society brands will be involved in the launch of the Current Account Switch Service, backed by a multimillion-pound television advertising campaign introducing customers to a “simpler world” of switching. The Payments Council, the independent body that has spearheaded the initiative, promises that switching will become “reliable and hassle-free” and make tales of month-long delays a thing of the past.