Reborn TSB will support local communities, boss pledges

Source: Daily Mail, LondonSept.儲存倉 09--The giant ExCel centre in London's Docklands is a lonely place at the end of the day. Occasionally you may spy a security guard shuffling along in the distance, but otherwise its vast corridors are cold and deserted.It seems an odd time and place for Paul Pester, chief executive of Britain's newest bank, TSB, to choose for his first interview about the business he's proudly spent a year building.The first rebranded 246 branches of this bank open their doors today. A further 385 will be unveiled over the next 48 hours.When we meet there are still three weeks to go. Pester has picked this vast conference centre for our meeting because just an hour earlier a hall the size of an aircraft hangar had been filled with 800 excited staff who had been hearing, also for the first time, exactly what kind of bank they would be working for.The employees have gone home, but their faces and their aspirations for the new bank line the walls of one of the exhibition rooms.They have been snapped holding slogans they have written about 'serving the people in their town', and 'wanting to be helpful'.'I wanted you to see this,' says Pester, 49, gesturing round the room, 'so you can get a feeling for the message we hope to give customers _a message that will be passed down by our colleagues.'He uses the word colleagues a lot. He means staff, of course, from senior managers to those in call centres and branches.It is not just for effect, or because it is part of some management jargon he has picked up to empower staff or to copy John Lewis, rather it is because he really feels that in this complicated bank transformation, everyone is in it together.The launch of TSB will be the first time a fully formed UK bank has ever launched.It has been formed under a European Commission ruling that forced Lloyds to give up 631 branches.This isn't the only head start TSB gets.The name will be familiar to most of its customers, having only disappeared from the High Street after being gobbled up by Lloyds in 1995.It has 4.5m customers, more than pounds sterling 1bn sitting in savers' accounts, and billions of pounds of mortgages outstanding. Managers can start lending from today.At first, there will be no television advertising _although on Wednesday a cartoon advert will start appearing in cinemas depicting the history of the Trustee Savings Bank, which was started in 1810 by the Reverend Henry Duncan as a community bank. It used the savings of local people to lend to others in the town.This localism is something you can expect to hear a lot about.Pester says: 'We are a bank for the local community _that's how we started out, and that's what we want to be again.'We want customers to know that if they save money with us that money is going to be used to invest in their local community, lent as mortgages to other local businesses. That's what banks are for.'We know, because we've asked them, that our bank managers want to be part of their local community. We want them in branches, and for people to recognise them when they walk down the street. If someone comes in to a branch and demands to see the manager, we want them to be there.'Pester is a man who seems to relish a challenge. He reveals that the previous time he visited the ExCel was for a迷你倉價錢triathlon, which he runs several of each year.He was chief executive of Virgin Money for five years at a time when it offered a radical new approach to banking.After joining Lloyds in 2005 as managing director of consumer banking, he then moved on to Santander where, working under then chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio, he oversaw the merger of Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley _another vast transformation process which saw hundreds of branches renamed overnight.When Horta-Osorio left for Lloyds Banking Group, Pester was one of the senior staff he took with him.Just 12 months after joining he was appointed chief executive of Project Verde _the scheme which would spin off Lloyds branches to form a new bank.It has been a project that became mired in controversy, first over the bidding process for the branches _which initially saw Co-op chosen as the preferred buyer _and then over the collapse of this deal, which led to the decision to spin TSB off into its own independent business.In the first few months of next year it will announce its intentions to float on the stock exchange.Despite these grand plans, at the heart of TSB lies a promise that it will focus on communities and honesty.It is going to spell out, in pounds and pence, how much it makes on current accounts.Pester says: 'If you use an ATM at a different bank then that costs us money, and we have to make that cost back somewhere.'So if you keep a few hundred quid in your bank account and we don't pay you interest on that, then that's how we do that. We want customers to realise this.'And though, for now, his pay is set by Lloyds Banking Group, he wants the way TSB executives are remunerated to be different to other banks.When TSB finally has a chairman and a board he will propose a new structure.Pester says: 'It's clear that the way banks pay their executives is not working in the eyes of the public. So we've looked around dozens of businesses to see what structures do work.'Today's launch will be Pester's biggest challenge yet. So has he thought about what it means to suddenly become a bank chief executive, where every decision and pay deal will be scrutinised?'Yes, wherever I've been, there has been nothing more exciting than trying to do something different,' he says.'Integrating all the branches at Santander was an enormous challenge, and was quite similar to this in that branches had to change overnight. But nothing has ever been done like this, we've never had a brand new, fully formed bank launch in the UK.'But for all his grand talk of local banking and putting customers first _when he finally has profit-hungry shareholders won't there be a very different set of demands to answer?Pester says: 'We think the proposition for investors is exactly the same as it is for customers. We're a bank that supports local communities and business.'Banks didn't get into the position they are in today because they invested in two or three more staff to help in branches, they got into this mess because they did not lend money responsibly.'We won't do that, and that makes us attractive for customers and investors.'Copyright: ___ (c)2013 Daily Mail (London, ) Visit the Daily Mail (London, ) at .dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉最平