When bank branches shuttered last year amid the pandemic, customers turned to digital channels to meet their banking needs and now TD Bank is gaming out its reopening strategy with an eye toward combining tech-driven insights with relationship banking.

The $1.4 trillion bank has so far taken a cautious approach to reopening, ensuring employees don’t move between different branches often and keeping back-office operations to a hybrid in-office and at-home work model. As consumers become more confident about in-person interactions, TD hopes to strike a balance between branch operations and functions clients can perform on their cell phones, like virtual queues and self-service for basics like check deposits.

“We see a tremendous opportunity here to leverage the brand and double down on our advice,” Ernie Diaz, head of consumer distribution, wealth and auto finance at TD Bank, told Bank Automation News. Personalization of advice powered by data analytics and service-usage patterns of customers will also inform the expanding advisory function at the bank, he added.

The drive toward boosting customer engagement via personalization has also been visible in moves made by other financial institutions, such as U.S. Bank, which recently rolled out an AI-powered savings tool and financial advice tech firm Envestnet’s April acquisition of Harvest Savings & Wealth Technologies, a platform that provides automated savings and wealth management tools to banks.

“We have certainly seen an increase in self-service transactions [and in] customers leveraging our digital channels,” Diaz said. “That is without a doubt, I think, a permanent change.”

Although the past year saw a surge in shifts toward digital banking, a report by research firm Forrester indicates that digital-only channels may deliver underwhelming results. “Banks shouldn’t abandon the branch but instead refocus it to drive customer and employee engagement,” noted Forrester in its “Predictions 2021: Banking” report.

While bank branches had been closing steadily even before the start of the pandemic, the outbreak sped closures, and 3,324 bank branches closed in 2020, according to a tally by S&P Global Market Intelligence. TD announced in January plans to shutter 81 of its 1,223 retail branches in the U.S. As the bank looks to bolster its branch services, closure decisions are formed by tracking consumer preferences and whether the consolidation will adversely impact client access, Diaz said.

“The opportunity coming out of COVID was, we had a number of the stores that we had already made decisions on. And we saw an opportunity because of some of the customer behavior changes,” Diaz said, adding that TD tends to lag behind most of its competitors in branch closures.

Looking ahead, the bank hopes to combine the physical and digital banking experience, allowing customers to access digital channels for services while offering the choice to come into the branch for a more qualitative or advisory conversation.

“While there have been changes in traffic patterns, the way we’re thinking about it is the store is at the center, really, of a lot of what we do,” Diaz said.