A Toronto Man Sued His Bank Over a 4PM Closing Time

Salimi, 38, runs a small commercial cleaning company in Etobicoke. In June 2025 a client paid him in cash, late on a Friday. He drove from a job in Vaughan to his branch in Bloor West. He parked at 4:08pm. The doors were locked at 4:00pm. The cheque he was trying to cover bounced on Monday. The NSF fee was $48. The reputational fee, in his words, was ‘bigger than that’.

He started by emailing the bank. They sent him to a complaints portal. The portal sent him to an ombudsman. The ombudsman sent him a PDF of branch hours. Nobody, at any point, answered the question he was actually asking: why 4pm? Why, in 2025, with online banking and automated reconciliation, do branches still close at the exact moment the average Canadian is wrapping up at work?

So he filed an Access to Information request with the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. He asked for any historical correspondence about standard branch operating hours. He waited four months. They sent him 312 pages.

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Most of it was junk — schedules, union letters, a 1987 memo about whether managers could wear short sleeves in summer. But on page 218 he found a one-page internal memo dated October 14, 1954, from a senior official at one of the Big Five, addressed to the Canadian Bankers Association.

The memo proposed standardising branch closing at 3pm so that tellers could ‘complete the day's reconciliations by hand and depart the premises before darkness in winter months’. The reasoning was practical: ledgers had to balance to the cent before anyone went home, and gaslit downtown streets in 1954 Toronto were considered unsafe for women cashiers walking to streetcars after sundown.

By the late 1960s electronic accounting made the 3pm cutoff unnecessary. Branches pushed to 4pm to grab walk-ins. Then ATMs arrived in the 1980s, then debit, then online banking. At every step, branch hours could have moved later. They didn't. The 1954 logic was gone but the 1954 schedule stayed.

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Salimi kept digging. He found a 2008 internal study from a Big Five bank — leaked years ago to a financial journalist, never officially released — that estimated extending branch hours to 6pm would cost roughly $180 million per year across the industry. The same study estimated it would generate roughly $90 million in additional fee revenue. Net loss. Case closed. Doors stay locked.

Meanwhile, the gap created an entire industry. Credit unions that opened later picked up customers. Then ING Direct (now Tangerine). Then Wealthsimple. Then EQ Bank. Salimi's own business banks with EQ now. He has not set foot in his old branch since the lawsuit was settled.

He did sue, by the way. Small claims, $48 plus filing fees. The bank settled for $200 and an apology letter that he keeps framed in his office. The apology does not mention the 1954 memo. The apology mentions ‘evolving service standards’.

‘What I learned,’ Salimi told us, ‘is that the doors aren't closed because of you. They were closed because of a woman in 1954 who needed to catch a streetcar before dark. Nobody ever told her she could leave a little later.’