Our New Bankers

Changing Banks
Recently we changed our bankers. This makes it the fourth change since 1964, and the fifth bankers in our history.
We started out with District Bank because our family banked there. They merged with National Provincial Bank and Westminster Bank to become National Westminster Bank, now known as Natwest Bank. They appear to have had more names than we have had bankers.
We had a short period with Barclays before moving back to Natwest. We changed to Yorkshire Bank (previously Yorkshire Penny Bank) in about 1979, and for many years they were excellent. Our manager used to phone me about once a week and we would have lunch together. He was an exceptionally nice man, and we benefitted from some good advice from him over the years. Sadly he seemed to be under heavy stress during his last few years with the bank, and died within about a year of retiring. Yorkshire Bank was then bought by an Australian banking group, and there are now all sorts of targets. The objective now appears to be to make as much money as possible out of each customer without any regard for the wellbeing of the customer. In fact for the last year we felt they were trying to screw us on every possible occasion.

Royal Bank of Scotland
We moved to RBS primarily because they would give us a much bigger borrowing facility than Yorkshire Bank. In addition, we could discuss things with our new RBS manager who we felt was interested in learning how our business works. From the old experience of moving to Barclays about thirty years ago, we worried that they might be being very nice until they got our account, and then change once they had got us, but we have been very pleasantly surprised at how good they continue to be.
Amazingly we can phone and speak to a real person immediately instead of grappling with a computerised voicemail system, we don't get routed through a call centre.
They have a slightly different organisation structure, which was easy to grasp. We deal with three different groups of people. Our "manager" is a "relationship manager", and has a small team who we primarily deal with for anything important.
When we first called at the branch to pay in, we were favourably impressed by how "on-the-ball" the branch staff were, and we continue to be impressed. They apologise if they have kept us waiting for 5 or 10 seconds, and really seem to want to make an effort to maintain high standards of service. Sometimes there are fresh flowers on the counter, perhaps this is because of the mainly female staff.
Because we have currency accounts in US dollars and euros, we also deal with another section, their corporate division, or whatever its called. Contacts with this section are also OK.
A few of the bank's procedures are different from those of our old bank, so we had to learn a few new skills, but the effort was worthwhile.

Changeover Day
On changeover day, Kaye Wainwright, our relationship manager, visited us three times in all, and helped to ensure a smooth transition. She and her staff dealt with a last moment hitch with amazing grace. Kaye's third visit of the day was at about 7.30 p.m. on her way home. Needless to say we were very impressed.

Internet Banking
We now use RBS's Royline online banking facility, developed by Natwest, who they now own. It works well and is very useful.

...So Far, So Good
At first we kept wondering when a wheel would fall off, our new bankers are so much better than our old ones, but as time has passed, we believe that wheels are not about to fall off, and RBS are as good as we first thought. Perhaps it's just that our old bankers had become so bad, that we were beginning to think they were normal. In the past four years, our sales have doubled each year, quite a reasonable growth rate for a 40 year old business. We ascribe this to building a 3,000+ page product and information catalogue on our growing number of websites, and a lot of hard work. During our last year with Yorkshire Bank we repeatedly asked our manager to visit us as we believed he had no understanding of the operation of our business. With Royal Bank of Scotland, we feel we can confidently continue to grow. Our main problem currently is trying to keep up with our flow of orders. After our growth in recent years, we need to improve most of our systems to cope with the volume of business, computerise our order processing, and add a few more staff. Next year we hope to have time to take a holiday!

Recommendations
We would heartily recommend any business to look at Royal Bank of Scotland with a view to moving their account to them. We would just as heartily advise any business using Yorkshire Bank to seriously consider leaving.
Watch this space.

Bankers

Royal Bank of Scotland
87 Bond Street
Blackpool
Lancashire
FY4 1BW

Telephones
Tel: 01253 348938