South African banking institutions are transitioning from the conventional banking operating system to a more automated and digitalised one. Banking institutions compete against one another to take control of the market share available in the banking industry. The adoption of automated and digitalised-driven practices has become the norm for banking institutions to serve more customers with fewer resources. The Covid-19 pandemic significantly accelerated the rate of adopting automation through digitisation and digitalisation. This paper aims to understand whether the adoption of bank automation is coupled with the trend of the banking institutions' physical footprint. Thus, a conceptual research framework was developed to streamline the banking institutions' footprint regarding the interest in adopting automation within the banking industry. The descriptive statistics of the banks' annual integrated reports and fact sheets revealed an overall decrease rate of 19 percent countrywide in the number of banking outlets/branches from early 2015 to the end of 2021 for the five prominent banking institutions in South Africa, known as Absa, FNB, Nedbank, Standard Bank and most recently Capitec Bank.