Brazil's bank branch network has contracted 42 percent since 2015, leaving nearly half the country's municipalities without any in-person service while the largest lenders post record profits. The five biggest banks earned 124 billion reais, about US$24.5 billion, in 2025.
The arithmetic of disappearance
Between 2015 and May 2026 the network shrank from 22,928 branches to 14,381, a loss of roughly thirty outlets a week. In the most recent comparable year the five largest banks closed 1,345 branches between them: Santander 579, Itaú 319, Bradesco 296, Caixa 138 and Banco do Brasil 13. The result is stark: 2,649 municipalities, 48 percent of the total, now have no in-person banking at all. That affects 19.7 million people, roughly nine percent of Brazil's population. Six hundred and thirty-eight towns have lost their last branch since 2015, leaving 6.9 million people with none.
The workforce follows the footprint
Employment has moved in step. The sector has shed 93,300 net posts since 2015. In the year to May 2026 the three big private banks cut nearly 14,000 jobs between them, Santander 6,100, Itaú 4,600, Bradesco 3,000, while Banco do Brasil shed a further 1,400. Since 2020, 25,500 of the eliminated positions, about 79 percent, were held by women. Women's share of the workforce fell from 49 percent to under 47 percent in a single year.
Digital substitution has limits
What replaced the branches is not nothing. Contracts with banking correspondents, lottery agents, shop counters and small retailers authorised to handle basic transactions, rose 49 percent between 2015 and 2025. Credit cooperatives have expanded into the same gaps. Juvandia Moreira, who heads the bank workers' confederation, said the work is not being eliminated but transferred to correspondents, opening space for cooperatives in areas the banks have abandoned. A correspondent cannot resolve anything complicated.
The profit motive is not hidden
Febraban's own technology survey, published in June, records that 83 percent of all banking transactions in Brazil now happen through digital channels and 78 percent through mobile. Brazilians made 240.8 billion banking transactions in 2025, of which 187.5 billion were on a phone, up 11 percent in a year and 169 percent over five. Seventy-six percent of customers do more than four-fifths of their banking digitally. The three big private banks made 87 billion reais, about US$17.2 billion, in 2025, up 16.4 percent. Bradesco's efficiency ratio improved 2.8 percentage points to 48.4 percent on exactly this kind of cost reduction.