RBS should embrace shared community banks

Part of the disastrous RBS results announcement is a commitment to achieve efficiency savings of £2.5bn a year by 2011.

We all know what ‘efficiency savings’ means and at the Campaign for Community Banking Services we want to avoid seeing branch closures in deserving but lower income rural and urban communities.

This could be avoided if RBS merged the 312 overlapping RBS and NatWest branches in English town centres: dual branding is a luxury that can no longer be afforded if the taxpayer is bailing you out. Go a stage further and embrace the concept of shared community banks and banking centres for the bottom and middle tier (Bank closure problems report) of NatWest’s 1600 branch network in England & Wales and annual savings of £300m could be achieved.