Numbers Part 11: the Royal Bank of Scotland

Today’s numbers are really good though, as they come from a bank.  I
say that’s good because the last time I put some bank numbers up, it
was the most read blog entry of the whole year.  That was for HSBC.
 Today, it’s the turn of Royal Bank of Scotland, or RBS for short.  Or
is that RBS-ABN after their winning bid for ABN AMRO last year. If the
latter, then it could be BBRANS or SNARBB ...

... sorry, I digress.

According to the Bankers’
Top 1000 issue this month, RBS is the third largest bank in the world
by Tier 1 Capital, and the largest bank in the world by Assets, with
$88.7 billion of capital and $3.8 trillion of assets (Citigroup is #2
and HSBC #1).

RBS was the 8th largest bank in 2007, but romped up the rankings to #3 thanks to the ABN AMRO acquisition.

I'm not sure if the stats I received from a friend today include
ABN's numbers but, according to this info, RBS serves/processes:

• 50 CHAP payments;
• 131 customer calls;
• 351 customers in branch;
• 467 customers online;
• 837 mail items to customers;
• 2,390 ATM withdrawals;
• 7,230 POS transactions;
• 7.626 credits and debits;

every minute of every day!

The group has over 170,000 employees worldwide, and more staff in
the USA than Nike, more in Asia than Yamaha, and more in Europe than
Ryanair, TomTom and Puma combined.

That’s a lot of people!

RBS Group property services manage over 3,500 buildings worldwide, representing over 2.2 million square metres of floor space.

That’s bigger than Monaco!

Global Transaction Services (GTS) operates in 52 countries with
4,000 employees. GTS manage over 12 million changes to standing orders
and direct debits every year whilst the bank’s Payment Operations
handled over £50.1 billion (US$100 billion) in cash through the ATM
network.

That’s £7.47 (US$15) for each person on earth!

RBS Group’s oldest branch is at 1 Fleet Street, London. That branch
has been there since 1673 (and the staff?).  This branch pre-dates the
actual bank, as RBS was not established until 1727, the date of their
oldest bank note, with ‘1727’ seen as a brand in several parts of the
Group.

That's seriously old!

The bank was actually founded shortly after Scotland was nearly
bankrupted by the Darien Project. This Project was an attempt to set up
a trading colony that would emulate the success of the English East
India Company in the Panama canal, but it failed and meant that most of
Scotland’s wealth went with it.

That's why the Scottish hate the English (along with a few hundred years of beating each other up)!

Maybe that’s also why RBS protect their money so well, as the UK
branch network saw a 63% decrease in robberies last year, compared to
142% increase in robberies for the rest of the British banking industry.

Or maybe it is just the Rottweiler’s they now keep in all branches.

Postnote:

I know that this is just shameless advertising on behalf of RBS so if you have some stats you would like me to blog about, email me!

BTW, if you want more of this sort of stuff about RBS, you can find it here.