RBS brand retained – but only just, says bank’s image boss

Royal Bank of Scotland’s new marketing director has admitted the bailed-out bank’s ‘RBS’ brand was nearly completely scrapped before it was switched out in England and Wales.

In May it emerged that the RBS branding will be stripped from 500 branches in England, Wales and Scotland.

However, with it now receiving a renewed push in Scotland, former head of advertising at Coca-Cola, David Wheldon, who took over marketing at the Edinburgh-based banking giant last year, told The Times that it would have been “nuts” to drop the famous brand altogether.

Instead, RBS is to remain a corporate-facing brand with the consumer-facing entity changed to the longer Royal Bank of Scotland.

Mr Wheldon said: “The brand that serves our customers is Royal Bank of Scotland, it is not RBS. When you are doing these things correctly you consider every option and evaluate them. We did look at .

“What we saw when evaluating the options is an awful lot of our customers and clients love the Royal Bank, all the people who work in the front line are proud of the Royal Bank and we would have been nuts to walk away from that heritage and strength as it does give us a competitive advantage if we use it wisely.”

On the new Scottish drive in its marketing, he said: “It is a long while since we appear to have been proud of our Scottishness and we should be. This is the beginning of being proud to be Scottish again.”

‘RBS’ was the brainchild of now disgraced former chief executive Fred Goodwin, who led the giant to the edge of the abyss.

Mr Goodwin said at the time that the full version of the bank’s name was too parochial and would hold it back from achieving the global expansion plans from which it is now desperately retreating.

In August the company’s chief executive Ross McEwan admitted that the brand “no longer has global aspirations”.

It has been replaced by the NatWest division in England and Wales, while in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland the Ulster Bank brand is expanding.