RBS Group rebrands as Natwest Group
Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Group has recently announced plans to change its name to NatWest group at some point during 2020.
The proposed change is an attempt to remove the bank from its association with the 2008 financial crisis when the global bank was bailed out by the UK Government at £45bn.
According to RBS, the name change will not reflect a change in its services or that of NatWest. There are no plans to change the names of individual RBS and NatWest branches or to cut jobs.
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N26 stops UK operations due to Brexit
In February, EU digital bank N26 decided to withdraw its operations within the UK, which it claims is due to the issues created by UK’s plans to leave to EU. On 11 February, it issued the following statement:
“With the UK having left the EU at the end of January, we will in due course no longer be able to operate in the UK with our European banking licence. As such we can no longer open new N26 accounts and will be closing existing accounts on 15 April 2020.”
However, there does not appear to be any other banks intending to follow N26 and withdraw UK operations.
N26 has changed its com/en-gb page to an FAQ page for its UK N26 account holders. In a bid to gain N26 leavers, digital bank Monzo has advertised itself as a viable option for UK N26 customers to switch to following its departure.
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Santander hires Apple executive
Banco Santander announced this month that it had hired ex-Apple executive Trish Burgess as the head of peer to peer payments within Santander’s global payments and digital team.
The position is a newly created role for Burgess, who’s role within Apple was providing direction for the launch of the new Apple credit card. She had also worked within the team responsible for the Europe and Asia rollout of Apple Pay.
Burgess’s new team in Santander includes several other ex-technology executives from the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and PayPal.
In April 2019, Santander promised to spend €20bn over the following four years on digital technology, citing payments as the focus for the future of its financial service.
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