Friday 5 February 2010

Retroprogressive Banking

I should have realised banking was doomed when I last visited my branch to 'see the manager'. These days of course the manager is far too exalted a personage to deal with financial minnows like me, so it was one of his small standing army of branch middle management who saw me. She was a buxom youngish lady with a rather common accent who addressed me throughout as 'Nigel' (at least it wasn't 'Nige'). She had nothing to tell me and nothing to offer that wasn't going to cost money - but what struck me, as I gazed around to keep my mind occupied during our interview, was how little my bank now resembled a bank. It could have been anything at all really - a slightly upmarket Job Centre, some kind of waiting room, a discreet pox doctor's - impossible to tell. Not only have banks dropped the word 'bank' from their names, they no longer offer any visible evidence of what they do, preferring expanses of carpet, strangely shaped receptionist's desks and pale wood cubicles to the familiar rows of tellers behind glass, doing bank stuff. That's why I like the sound of this development - back to proper banking - and hope that Metro Bank gets its licence. My own proposal (which most definitely won't get a licence) is to take it further with a chain of Retro Banks, run on similar principles, styled with restrained grandeur and gravitas, where the manager wears morning dress with wing collar (think Captain Mainwaring in his work clothes) and the staff well cut lounge suits (the gents) and elegant black dresses with white blouses (the ladies), and there are tellers galore. And they will all address all customers by surname and honorific.

10 comments:

  1. That does sound good. I'm going to march into Metro Bank on Monday and ask to deposit tuppence.

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  2. Rubbish name, though, 'Metro'.

    I'd have called it 'Ampleforth and Haythornthwaite of Mayfair'.

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  3. Is it just me, or did banks used to have a bank smell? It was kind of similar to the post office smell

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  4. No Worm, you are not mistaken - it was the smell of Ronuk or Mansion polish, left by the cleaners who arrived at 6.00am to clean and buff the parquet floor and the hand-fashioned mahogany fittings, and burnish the brass. If you could face Bronco, a visit to the lav was also possible, amid the miasma of bleach and urinal blocks. Mmmm, those were the days.

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  5. When the great banking crisis arrived, I planned to buy a bank (for tuppence), rename it "Dour and Daughter", equip it with the slogan "The Bank That Likes To Say 'No'" and make moderate yet pleasing profits. Alas, the bloody government got in the way, with much inferior results.

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  6. Your post made me realize that I don't think I've ever met a bank manager, on or off the pitch. The few folks I've seen have titles involving things like "client services" or "financial planning", which, had I gone along with any of their suggestions, would actually have meant "bankruptcy planning". Maybe being a bank manager these days is just too Batemanesque, the job that dare not speak its name!

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  7. Once new a young lady who in nineteen sixty four worked in the, I think, Midland bank in Sutton, in the high st, they had coat pegs along the corridor wall, in order of seniority, jumping the pecking order led to a sojourn in the naughty corner. Beards were not allowed at the till counters, not that this was an issue with the above mentioned lady. Went to their Xmas party, remember the Cheers episode, the one where Norm held his accountants office party in the pub?.....

    As a consolation I took her to my firms party at Buckelsberry House in the city, she thought we were the ultimate Avant Garders.

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  8. Give it a week or two Nige, if this bears fruit then banks will cost less than a haircut. Students of the doom school of thought will note that we are neatly bracketed between Greece and Ireland, those paragons of financial prudence.

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  9. Don't forget the marble floors and tellers sitting behind brass cages.

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  10. I used to have a bank manager called Mr Organ. His initials were JT and I was stunned to discover they stood for John Thomas. He came from a Welsh Methodist background so we can accuse his parents of no more than naivety.

    Personally, I would reintroduce copperplate handwriting for statements and the reintroduction of large, leather-bound ledgers. This will cost so the work should be outsourced to elderly Brahminical gentlemen in Bengal.

    When I worked in the City - until about ten years ago - one of the senior directors recalled that part of his graduate training (as it wasn't called then) involved being taught copperplate and spending time at a bench in a banking hall filling in ledgers.

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