Residents of Courcelles, a town of less than 1,000 people in the heart of the Beauce region south of Quebec City, are getting accustomed to a visible change in their way of life: their local Caisse Desjardins branch is closed.
The outlet, after serving for decades as the financial cornerstone of the small town, was turned into a private residence because of lack of use.
The Caisse Desjardins financial services cooperative has been a fixture in small Quebec towns for over a century but regional boards have been quietly closing underused properties as customers increasingly go online for their financial needs. The change shows how advances in technology are affecting real estate and small town life across North America.
In the case of Courcelles, a local resident purchased the Caisse branch at 108 de l'Eglise and moved in, vault and all.
The Caisse Desjardins network included 669 service centres and 1,559 automated teller machines in Quebec and Ontario as of the end of last year. Caisse Desjardins plans to close about one-third of its facilities by the end of 2026. Cashier service centres accounted for just 1% of transaction volume, while ATMs accounted for just 3%, according to a note provided to CoStar News by Desjardins.
In Courcelles, a few citizens met with town officials in hopes of convincing Desjardins to keep the outlet open, according to Mayor Francis Bélanger. “But when Desjardins showed us the number of people using their tellers, we understood. Desjardins could only justify having one teller but for reasons of security they would have to pay a second person, so they took the decision to close the outlet and replaced it with an automated teller.”
The Desjardins Group made a point of contacting regular users of the human services offered at the branch to train them on using digital resources, Bélanger noted. Desjardins offered to sell the building to the municipality at a preferential price but Courcelles didn’t need any new property after it renovated its town hall in 2016, Bélanger explained.
Last spring, the Caisse Desjardins outlet in Saint Casimir, a town of under 2,000 residents midway between Trois-Rivières and Quebec City, closed. The mayor and residents were helpless to save the outlet, a bedrock for financing local businesses in such towns after it was founded by Alphones Desjardins in Lévis near Quebec City in December 1900.
“This is the prime financial company, the only one with a storefront presence in the regions of Quebec,” Saint Casimir Mayor Lise Baillargeon told CoStar News in an interview. “The Caisse is important not only for the investment they provide but also for their support for communal activities.”
As in Courcelles, townsfolk were forced to accept the closing. “The people using the outlet were a little taken aback but everybody is a little fatalistic,” she said. The Caisse also offered the municipality a chance to purchase the property but the town did not have the funds for it.
Yamachiche, Quebec, with a population of nearly 3,000, was one of several small towns near Trois-Rivières that wistfully bade farewell to their branch of the Caisse Desjardins. “They said it was not profitable because fewer people were using it,” said Paul Carbonneau, who served as mayor of the small town for six years. “The Caisse is at the heart of Quebec municipalities, they occupy good locations near other businesses.”
The Desjardins Group told CoStar News in an email that the ongoing closings are due to a lack of foot traffic. “Members are increasingly interested in interacting with Desjardins via digital solutions. We must therefore strike a balance between the evolution of our network of service centers and ATMs, and the investments required in digital solutions to continue to meet the needs of our member-customers,” said company representative Jean-Benoît Turcotti in an email.
The Caisse also has deep symbolic ties to bigger urban centres in Quebec, as witnessed in the Saint Raymond parish in the West End of Montreal where some residents successfully urged city officials to change the name of the local park to honour the local head of the Caisse Desjardins in 1996.
The outlet has since closed and some local residents have returned to calling the park by its previous traditional name, Oxford Park. Other recent Caisse Desjardins outlets put up for sale over the last year in Montreal include properties at 1250 Beaubien E., 8025 Notre Dame E. and 3830 Decarie Blvd.
Some of the other Quebec locations put up for sale over the last year include:
- 108 de l'Eglise St., Courcelles (population 814)
- 580 - 590 Ste-Anne St., Yamachiche (population 2,813)
- 5001 des Peupliers St, La Doré (population 1,359)
- 300 de la Montagne St., Saint Casimir (population 1,449)
- 4950 Principale St., Saint-Félix-de-Valois (population 6,975)
- 680 du Village St. Shawinigan (population 49,620)
- 350-352 5th Ave. Shawinigan(population 49,620)
- 533 132 Road, Cloridorme (population 607)
- 459 Knowlton St., Lac Brome (population 5,923)
- 138 St. Joseph St., Sainte-Martine (population 5,664)
- 585, 133 Road, Saint-Sebastien (population 692)