MADRID — Because he has Parkinson’s disease and his trembling hands make it difficult for him to press buttons, Carlos San Juan de Laorden, a retired Spanish doctor, finds it difficult to get his money from the ATM.
So when his bank lowered the stores’ hours in December and told him the only way to reach a customer representative was to make an appointment with an app he found too complicated, Mr. San Juan felt, 78, not only grieved, but also wronged.
“I was politely told I could switch banks if I didn’t like it,” he said. “I’ve kept my money in the same bank for 51 years, since I got my first paycheck, and it hurts to see that the digital world has dehumanized us to the point where loyalty has lost all its value.”
Infuriated, Mr. San Juan launched an online petition he called “I’m old, not an idiot,” arguing that banks and other institutions should serve all citizens, rather than sideline the oldest and most vulnerable members of society in their rush to online services.
In two months, his petition garnered more than 600,000 signatures, attracting the attention of the local media and eventually forcing the banks and the Spanish government to respond. Mr. San Juan became a minor celebrity in Spain and was invited to a series of TV shows to talk about himself and his campaign.
In February, Mr. San Juan attended the signing of a protocol at the Ministry of Economy in Madrid in which banks pledged to provide better customer service to seniors, including by extending the opening hours of their branches again, giving older people priority over access to counters and also simplify the interface of their apps and web pages.
At the signing ceremony, José María Roldán, the president of the Spanish Banking Association, thanked Mr San Juan for highlighting an issue he said banks had overlooked. “We have seen that new measures are needed not to leave vulnerable groups of people behind,” said Mr. Roldán, who is affiliated with banking giants such as Banco Santander and BBVA.
Spain has one of the fastest aging populations in the world, with 9.3 million over-65s, who now make up a fifth of the population. Before the pandemic hit, Spain was expected to overtake Japan as the country with the longest life expectancy in the world, according to a study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle.
But in the past decade, Spain’s banking network has also shrunk dramatically, following a financial crisis that forced the country to negotiate an international bailout in 2012. Although there used to be a bank branch in almost every Spanish village and intersection, banks have halved their number of branches to about 20,000 since the crisis.
Mr. San Juan is not a Luddite – for this article he used WhatsApp and Skype. But he believes older adults should not be paying the price for an online transition that has enabled banks and other institutions to implement significant employee discounts and other savings.
In fact, Mr. San Juan said it was ironic that few of the seniors he wanted to defend with his petition were among the signatories, possibly because they were not online. Still, he said: “A lot of younger people feel sympathy for us, starting with my own granddaughters who have been very concerned about my health and many others who now have an older relative who can’t handle apps, and in some cases someone who cannot afford a smartphone.”
mr. San Juan was forced into early retirement 13 years ago when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and tremors made it very difficult for him to carry out his hospital work as a urologist in his home city of Valencia, in eastern Spain. Since then, Mr. San Juan has spent his time listening to jazz and reading history books and spy novels—until he became an unlikely activist.
While acknowledging that the digital transition was unstoppable, Mr. San Juan said authorities and major institutions had a duty to make the change “less abrupt” for older and vulnerable people. Almost every public organization or private enterprise now forces people to communicate online, including in the health care sector, where Mr. San Juan has worked all his life.
Without Parkinson’s, Mr. San Juan said he would have liked to work for more years, although he looks with some skepticism at changes in the profession that require more remote consultations with patients.
“Medications to me are a human treatment, where you have to look a patient in the eye, talk and maybe comfort them if that’s what it takes.”
Mr. San Juan also noted that a model of Spanish society in which several generations used to live under the same roof and help each other was rapidly changing and putting more pressure on old people. When he was younger, Mr. San Juan lived with his only grandmother for a while. And after his mother-in-law became a widow, she lived with him and his wife for the last 15 years.
He added that as a result of his medical specialty, he had long been attuned to the challenges faced by the elderly.
“Being a urologist, most of my patients are older people, so I’ve always had a clear understanding of the feeling of helplessness and the suffering that can come with age,” he said.
As for the banks, Mr San Juan said his disappointment was fueled by the fact that the institutions did not hesitate to ask for billions in taxpayers’ money to bail them out during the financial crisis ten years ago. But as Covid-19 started to spread, he said, the same banks used the pandemic as an excuse to close more branches. According to data from the Bank of Spain, more than 3,000 branches in Spain were closed between the second quarter of 2020 and the third quarter of 2021.
“The coronavirus has been a perfect excuse for banks and others to force people to stay away and behave like robots, while also allowing their customers to do the work that bank employees used to do,” he said.
Some banks have taken measures to compensate for their reduced footprint. In 2020, Banco Santander signed an agreement with the Spanish postal service to allow its customers to withdraw cash from post offices in about 1,500 municipalities where the bank does not have a branch. But with millions of retirees forced to withdraw their pension payments from the banks, Mr. San Juan that the institutions still have a long way to go when it comes to caring for those on whom they depend, rather than prioritizing their shareholders.
“The banks should keep our pension money, but that should either oblige them to really act as a public service, or force the government to offer us another way to get hold of the money that is ours,” he said. “You can’t expect old people to have to queue for hours in the blazing sun or in the rain to collect their savings.”