Not everything out of the back of a van is bad!

Yet more names are about to be lost from the high street, Santander is removing familiar names such as Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley and replacing them with the name of a town in Spain called - Santander.

Left: Oliver and his friends were sure the new mobile bank stopped near here

Whilst at the other end of the spectrum, Norwich Union, a financial giant named after the city of its inception has changed its name to Aviva?? Lloyds has announced the Cheltenham & Gloucester will no longer have a presence on the high street and of course there is the long running saga of the Post Office and its village branch closures.

But a recent advertising campaign has caught my eye which seems to buck this trend of change or closure. NatWest is promoting banking that drives to your village high street and serves you from the back of a van. What a fantastic idea. It has all the hallmarks of times gone by: personal service, regular service, and I bet that if there is a queue, it is friendly and orderly, none of the foot tapping, sighing, watch checking impatience that many bank queues produce.

But can it stand the test of time? I remember as a child, all sorts of vans selling wares to the housewife; veg, bread, pop, books, fish & chips, but these days, you hardly see a milk float, so is it time to be launching van-banking, and will it ever be able to compete with internet banking?

Sadly, I think not, the truth is whilst it is nice to have a branch to pop into and talk to a real person, even better to have them drive up to see you, there is an amount of inconvenience involved on the part of the customer. You have to make the trip or you have to be available at a set time – unlike online banking. Some people may say it’s impersonal, but I don’t know many people who are happy to tell strangers their financial affairs. In fact having worked in a bank, I can say quite honestly, some people are more likely to tell you of their marital affairs than their financial ones, so impersonal may not be such an issue.

The beauty of high street banking is familiarity: take that away and what have you got left? Being a creature of habit, the benefit of online banking for me is that it is impersonal, and therefore least likely to change. There is also the added benefit that I can imagine the online bank to be staffed with people the same age as me, with the same life experiences, an illusion easily shattered by the reality of walking into a bank, regardless of its name or if it has wheels or not.