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The new economist
It might seem an unlikely time to launch the UK’s first bank in 130 years, but Vernon Hill believes a return to good customer service will secure its future. Richard Northedge meets the money man
Vernon Hill made a fortune when the Toronto Dominion Bank Financial Group bought the US bank he founded four decades ago; now he is spending part of the proceeds revolutionising British financial services. He has launched the UK’s first new bank for 130 years and is rolling out a chain of 200 branches. There are four myths of British banking, says Hill: “1. No-one switches accounts. 2. Rate is everything. 3. You can only make money by cutting costs. 4. The branch is dead.”
However, the man who founded Commerce Bank when he was just 26 intends to shatter these myths. He reckons UK customers will move banks for a better alternative, but he will offer service, not top rates. His Metro Bank will be branch-based, with staff on hand. Unlike other UK banks, Metro opens for longer hours than its equivalents, seven days a week. And, also unlike other banks, it hands out lollipops and dog biscuits. Unusually too, new clients receive bank cards and cheque books on the spot. Colourful giant Magic Money Machines count customers’ coins.
That might attract private customers looking for more fun when doing their financial transactions than the traditional UK bank offers, but Hill is looking for business customers too. Especially those small firms who have found themselves uncatered for, not only at Britain’s homegrown lenders, but also at the foreign financial institutions that made a grab for UK corporate clients before the credit crunch but which retreated abroad again to nurse their damaged balance sheets.
Hill’s own banking empire started as a small business. He established Commerce Bank in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, in 1971 when most other 26 year-olds were still buying their first car. “I worked in a bank when I was at high school,” he explains, and he got jobs at a couple of others after leaving Wharton, the Philadelphiabased business school. To Hill, it looked easy enough to found his own bank. He describes nonchalantly how, even as a youngster, he set about finding people to invest their savings, obtained his licence from the authorities, sought out premises and took on staff.
He still employs the philosophy developed in that first business experience. “We thought customers would give us more of their money for the service experience,” he says.
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www.ukti.gov.uk | page 31
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