There is certainly no shortage of experts willing to prognosticate on the future of the retail bank branch.

For well over a decade, the futurists have generally aligned themselves around one of two sides of the debate. Those predicting the end of the branch as we know it, and those predicting even more branches with wider use of technology that resemble something out of the movie "The Minority Report." 

Even Microsoft's Bill Gates referred to bank branches as dinosaurs in 1996 and predicted that we would soon live in a world without branches. Consequently, the arrival of each new branch killing technology such as ATMs, telephone banking, Internet banking, PayPal, and mobile banking has fueled a debate primarily focused on the lifespan of the brick-and-mortar structure we call the branch.