Bank branch betrayal

AT THE shortly-to-be-closed Nat-West branch of Hay-on-Wye a week ago, the queue at the picturesque outlet snaked out the door. Polite counter staff addressed each customer by name. They included a small-business person paying in cash, the senior citizen (who couldn’t remember his pin number) checking a balance before making a withdrawal and a women collecting a largish cash sum to pay a tradesman.

In future Hay residents, and the incomers during the book festival, will have to make the 15.6-mile journey to Brecon or jam the Post Office branch on the High Street for banking services. Promises our bankers once made never to close the last branch in town have been scrapped. Hundreds will be shuttered this year.

In these days of online banking, branches might seem like an anachronism.

But for small firms, the elderly, the young being encouraged to save and those who have a fear of cyber-crime, bank branches are the lifeblood of the community.

Going to the branch and dealing with trained staff (as long as it is not the Reading branch of Lloyds) provides a degree of safety and certainty.

Banks talk to investors about bringing down costs. Lloyds chief executive Antonio Horta Osorio parades his bank’s costincome ratio as a badge of honour.

But if lowering costs is achieved at the expense of customer service it likely will come back to bite the providers in terms of reputation and ability to extend the brands into new areas such as wealth management.

There is one certainty about all of this. Today’s fashion will be tomorrow’s mistake. In the latter part of the 20th century the big grocery chains – Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Safeway (as it then was) – shut down many High Street branches and smaller neighbourhood stores, and invested heavily in fringe of town super-stores.

In the last decade the biggest push has been back into convenience stores with grocers deploying teams of property experts searching for sites up and down the land.

How long will it be before one of the High Street banks decides that local branch banking and the personal service provided is a unique selling point which cannot be replicated online?

Hidden hand

WHEN will Andy Hornby be rumbled?

As these pages report today, the discredited former boss of failed bank HBOS Andy Hornby is effectively running Britain’s most establishment bookmaker Ladbroke Coral.

Industry insiders tell us that as chief operating officer he oversees the gambling group’s retail and digital arms, making up some 85pc of revenues.

Yet Hornby’s role is hidden from the view of investors.

There is no glowing biography in the annual report, and he is not a main board director – so stakeholders have no way of knowing his remuneration package or to track any share transactions.

The reason for this subterfuge is that almost a decade after HBOS was rescued by Lloyds bank, leading to nine years of lost dividends and suffering for Lloyds shareholders, Hornby has still not been fully cleared of any misbehaviour at the bank.

It is understood investigations by the Financial Conduct Authority and others are continuing after the publication of an excoriating report last year into the way in which the bank was run during Hornby’s stewardship.

Company law would almost certainly define Hornby’s role at Ladbroke Coral as that of a ‘shadow director’.

Such a person is one ‘in accordance with whose directions and instructions the directors of a company are accustomed to act’.

Chairman John F Kelly and independents on the Ladbrokes Coral board would do well to clarify Hornby’s position.

They wouldn’t want to find the Queen’s bookies, who operates in a politically sensitive area, on the wrong side of corporate governance rules.

Summer love

MOVE over craft beers, Fever-Tree mixers and premium gin brands. Hipsters have rediscovered an unfashionable holiday snifter.

Majestic Wines reports that sherry sales (no, not syrupy Harveys Bristol Cream) have soared by 46pc this year with the premium brands, those in the £10 to £15 category, up 71pc.

A favourite in Tapas bars, it can be mixed with mint, ice and soda. Top choices are the ultra-dry Manzanilla styles such as Tio Pepe served ice cool.

All we need now is a late summer heatwave.