I'm an RBS insider. I'm not going to give much more info than that as I want to protect my identity but over coming weeks/months I hope to expose a lot of practices that are going on in RBS (and I guess many of the other banks too!) so feel free to check out my blog at http://rbsinsider.blogspot.com/

All comments and feedback welcomed, either here or there!

Let's start with some background. RBS owns NatWest. Behind the scenes they're effectively one and the same with managers from one brand managing staff from the other and vice versa. The bank is divided into several divisions, the most obvious ones being the high street branch network or 'retail bank' as it's known internally (file the word 'retail' away for the moment!) and 'business banking', whose managers are generally branch based but do not report to the branch manager. They have a separate line management structure usually covering a particular area or region.

Both the branches and the individual business managers are targeted to bring in certain voumes of business each week, e.g. x no of loans, y number of mortgage leads, z no of new business accounts, x amount of fee income, y amount of deposits, z amount of insurance leads, etc., etc., etc. Every product has a points value which is logged and reported electronically and fed into internal league tables.

The pressure to deliver these targets is immense and takes the form of frequent and regular audio conference calls, twice weekly activity reports, 1-2-1 meetings, 'Action Contracts' where performance fails to meet the bank's expectations and quarterly performance reviews. Annual salary reviews are performance related.

Do not kid yourself for one minute that the bank considers itself to be in a service industry. They are a sales organisation from start to finish. Everything is geared towards generating income with increasingly little regard for quality after sales service.

Branch and business managers have no authorirty to agree any lending (all applications have to be approved by the computer system or agreed by either the Personal or Business Lending Units) and limited authority to agree customer refunds.

The provision of online and telephone access to your account is not designed to improve service for you though I accept it is more convienient for many but simply to reduce the costs involved in staffing branches to deal with balance and transaction enquires when they could be selling more products/accounts to existing and new customers.

Picking up on one comment from a previous reviewer about the appointments book or diary; there isn't one, at least not in the traditional sense. The branches operate a computerised diary called Retail Diary into which appointments are booked specific to each individual in the bank. The system tracks the customer facing activity of each employee and reports how effective they are in their jobs in terms of appointment slots available and utilised. A business banking manager is expected to adopt a '5:1:5:15 model week'; thats 5 service review meetings with existing customers, 1 meeting with an existing client with an RBS product partner rep, e.g. Lombard, 5 appointments with new to bank prospective clients (of which the banks expects 3 new business accounts to be opened each week), and 15 pro-active telephone calls to existing clients, the intention being to offer additional lending facilities or identify additional cross sales opportunities. Regional management refer to banking as a 'contact sport'!

One other thing before I wind this up for now; as of mid November 2008, business account holders of both NatWest & RBS are about to be sent a booklet about how to trade through the economic downturn. A bit rich coming from a bank that's just had to go cap in hand to the Government for bail-out of up to £20Bn don't you think! Another shining example of the sheer arrogance of the senior management within an company that's so far removed from reality it's untrue!

That's some food for thought to kick things off. Check back here regularly for further postings!