RBS 2009 Annual Report Download - page 25

23RBS Group Annual Report and Accounts 2009
Divisional review
UK Retail
Did you know?
£10.2 billion
Our net mortgage lending in the
UK was £10.2 billion
We recognise that there’s strong competition on the high street and we
need to help restore the reputation of The RBS Group. We intend to do
this by becoming the UK’s most Helpful and Sustainable bank with a
strategic programme to:
•re-engage our customers
•restore the pride of our people
•radically simplify the business
•grow quality revenue.
We’re already putting Helpful and Sustainable banking into practice. In
September, we cut the price of un-arranged borrowing and reduced the
fee we charge for unpaid items from £38 to £5 and the maximum monthly
charge was halved. We also decreased referral fees, maintenance
charges and interest rates for un-arranged borrowing on most accounts.
We continued to provide advice to customers and other people who are
concerned about their personal finances through our flagship MoneySense
programme. Through MoneySense for Adults, 1,000 trained advisers
helped nearly 26,000 people through a MoneySense interview. Our
MoneySense for Schools Programme, which we’ve been running for 16
years, teaches children how to manage their money. In 2009, more than
28,000 lessons were delivered in over 1,500 schools. Scottish Financial
Enterprise recognised the success of MoneySense and gave us their
Innovation for Investment in the Community Award in 2009. For
customers who find themselves in financial difficulty, we have invested in
more people to help them, and also developed an income and expenditure
toolkit which is already being used to help 40,000 customers a month
better understand how they can manage their money.
It’s also important that we provide a service that fits in with our customers’
lifestyles. Many of our customers want to visit a branch but can’t do so
during the week. It’s important for them that they can come and talk to us
on a Saturday and during the year we changed the opening hours of
more than 600 branches so that we could better meet their needs.
To become more efficient we have invested in online banking and the
number of active online banking customers increased by almost one
quarter during the year. Our online customers have benefited from improved
help facilities and we launched our online retirement planning tool for
Private Banking customers, which will help them plan for the future.
Over 5.5 million accounts have chosen to convert to paperless banking.
Receiving their statements online rather than through the post is better
for the environment and has saved postage and printing costs.
To increase the service options available to our customers we introduced
almost 450 Cash Deposit Machines to more than 250 branches. This
enables customers to make deposits without queuing and, so far, more
than £2 billion has been deposited in this way, which has freed up a
significant amount of our employees’ time to serve customers even better.
We continued to take advantage of developments in technology to
improve the service we provide our customers. During the year, we were
the first UK bank to launch a mobile banking application for the iPhone.
We were delighted by its popularity as we received 300% more customer
registrations than we had originally targeted.
More changes are in the pipeline through our Retail Transformation
Programme as we apply Lean thinking and techniques across the
business. Already, our first pilots have delivered efficiency savings
amongst our customer facing teams, and we expect these benefits to
continue as we apply the lessons learned across the country.
We are committed to improving what we do to become the UK’s most
Helpful and Sustainable bank and it’s encouraging that both RBS and
NatWest retain a strong position for service in our customers’ eyes. We
know we still have a long way to go and that 2010 will be a demanding
year. However, we’re confident that with the changes we’re making we’ll
build a successful business that will play a huge part in returning the
Group to self-sufficiency.