Clearing Banks: Organisation

Abstract

Britain’s big banks today differ much, though not wholly, from their old selves twenty years ago. They have become multinationals, with their chiefs highly rewarded in line with trends in modern United Kingdom industry. They have fallen in with the march of technology, so crucial to today’s financial world and have spent billions on electronic gadgetry from hole-in-the-wall cash dispensers to the most complex equipment for international and stock market operations.

I was asked to help ease the bank forward from the nineteenth century, but the actual transition was more like one from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.

A former bank deputy-chairman.

The capital of a bank should be a reality, not a fiction.¹