Guest Blog: The Bank that had the keys to the kingdom

Plenty of people in business have views about the way banks have treated them, few feel able to make them public. RUTH SHEARN had a ringside seat when Bank of Scotland became a client of her PR company. This is her story...

The 'confession' from the ex-CEO of Bank of Scotland that the bank was warned by the FSA three years ago to put a break on its over-zealous lending came as no surprise to me.
I have an abnormally high interest level in the fortunes of Bank of Scotland on a professional and personal level because it had a profound effect my own fortunes and was pivotal in the success of my own business.
A decade ago, RMS PR – then a tiny agency – was fortunate enough to be appointed to handle media relations for the Bank of Scotland across the whole of England.
What a brief! It remains one of the most enjoyable and rewarding periods of my career to-date.
As with any new client, it was important to get under the skin of the organisation, understand its culture and define succinctly its USP.
This was achieved by travelling around the country and meeting the managers and directors who were the lifeblood of the organisation. It was clear they were a different breed and that a different culture did exist. It was tangible, palpable – I loved each and every one of them. Some, naturally, more than others! What they all had in common was decency – they were old-fashioned gentlemen bankers.
In all the stories we pumped out to the media, we emphasised the fact that Bank of Scotland was not a faceless, process-driven organisation but one that genuinely cared for its customers, took a personal interest in them, that gave sound advice – the embodiment of Scottish prudence.
Most importantly – and this was the USP we identified – the managers had autonomy. They could take decisions for themselves without the need to refer to some 'higher-order'.
This empowerment meant the buck stopped with them so they thought long and hard about the decisions they took. This could have led them to be overly cautious and risk adverse but I can vouch for the fact, they weren't. They would take a leap of faith with customers – but only after seeing the whites of their eyes and feeling the fire in their bellies.
They would then take a decision based on a gut instinct that had been honed over years. Invariably their decisions were sound.
This simple and honourable approach to doing business continued for several years. We succeeded in securing stacks of media coverage across the UK for them, and helped topple their arch rival RBS from its top spot as leading lender of corporate finance in England. Hallelujah.
Then we started to spot the seeds of change.
There were grumbles and rumbles among the 100 plus gentlemen bankers we had loved dealing with for three years. They started to talk about cultural change within the organisation – that they were being set ambitious sales targets for the first time ever; that their decision-making powers were being eroded in favour of a centralised, process-driven system. They were not happy.
The very thing they had loved about their jobs – the empowerment and ability to get up close and personal with their customers – was being taken away. Some, possibly the more enlightened and visionary ones, left for other banks. Others, the more optimistic and naive, stayed and tried to adapt to their new roles and way of doing business.
RMS PR was retained for a further year and witnessed firsthand the seismic changes that went on internally. We talked with the 'old guard' about the new way approach to doing business, about the young swords who’d usurped them – none of them career bankers but target-orientated salesmen. And, yes, the word shark was even mentioned a few times.
We stopped working with Bank of Scotland seven years ago. Now, it has emerged the organisation was warned three years ago to change its ways of doing business or it could have a catastrophic effect on its customers and the wider economy.
It saddens me what happened. They had the keys to the kingdom, They had survived and prospered for over 300 years just by sticking to the basics and giving prudent, common sense advice.
Greed got the better of them and sadly, it has had a knock-on effect on the rest of us, too.
We've traded on our association with Bank of Scotland for many years – it's a great name to have had on our list of clients. It saddens me profoundly that the brilliant job we did for that then fabulous organisation will now be tarnished by association with the organisation it turned into.