When I was a schoolboy in Edinburgh in the 1960s, the head office of the Bank of Scotland was an imposing building on the Mound, the street that leads from Princes Street to Edinburgh Castle and the Royal Mile. The Royal Bank of Scotland, its arch-rival, occupied Dundas House, the finest property in the city’s Georgian New Town.
Banking was then a career for those who did not quite make the grades required by the good universities. If they joined either of these two institutions, they might with diligence become branch managers after 20 years. The bank manager was a community figure who would base his (they were all men) lending decisions as much on his local knowledge and the character of the borrower as on figures. He expected to spend his career at the bank and retire with a generous pension to spend more time on the golf links where he had schmoozed his clients. It never crossed his mind, or those of his customers, that the bank he had joined would not continue forever in broadly its existing form.
By the time both banks failed in 2008, the financial world had changed beyond recognition. The causes included globalisation, deregulation, technological and product innovation and new ideologies, as well as shifts in social and cultural norms.