Barclays is currently developing new ways to ‘completely automate’ as much of its branch operations as possible, the bank’s CEO of retail and business banking said at a banking conference.

Ashok Vaswani, CEO of retail and business banking at Barclays, confirmed that 72 of Barclay’s branches now offer next generation cash machines developed by Barclays and German manufacturer Wincor Nixdorf, according to a report by Express.

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Over half of ¬Barclays’ 1500-branch network is expected be fitted with the new machines by the first -quarter of 2016.

"Because of things like this we have been able to -reduce our FTE [full-time equivalents] in the branch network by 1,300 folks -already," Vaswani said.

"So the more we can get it done hopefully you will see pretty significant FTE reductions in our physical footprint."

The refitted branches are staffed with cashiers who have been retrained as ‘community ­bankers’. They are armed with iPads to facilitate the automated process, according to Express report.

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"This is about giving people better roles. This is about getting rid of cashiers and tellers and telling them, by the way, you can do more with customers. You can engage more with customers and have more meaningful customer conversations," Vaswani added.

The next generation ATMs, which took three years to develop, allow ­people to withdraw and pay in cash, and pay in cheques and bills, some simply by scanning quick-response bar codes [QR codes] printed on their paper bills.

The British bank is also considering allowing customers to use make withdrawals using their smartphones, via the Barclays app to generate a QR code.

Vaswani said that within the space of two years, Barclays has gone from having no mobile banking customers to 3.3 million, helping the bank to cut costs.

"Obviously digital is far, far, far cheaper than the physical network. And as you can move transactions from the physical network to the digital network, it shows up nicely in the cost base," Vaswani concluded.