I Was So Impressed With This New British Bank That Looks Like A Cinema I Opened An Account

Metro Bank's Holborn offices really look more like a cinema than a bank. When I first stepped in, there was none of the library-like silence I'm used to at my own branch. It felt much more like what Metro Bank prefers it's branches to be called: a "store."

Chairman Vernon Hill is pretty much what you would expect from an American opening a bank in the UK. He's bullish, straight to the point, and busy.

"You look about 11 years old online," was the first thing he said when I met him "but you look at least 12 in person."

It's quite hard not to be taken in by the patter and glitz: and clearly I have been. I just signed up for an account. But that's also a sign of how drab and uncompetitive British banking is.

Metro Bank is one of a wave of "challenger banks" sniping at the big UK institutions: these include stand-alone firms like Aldemore and OneSavings Bank, as well as established consumer firms that have dived into banking, like Virgin, Marks & Spencer and Tesco.

Hill set up Commerce Bank in the US, and he says they've basically followed the same model in the UK:

The sort of gimmicks Hill mentioned are easy to see in the store: they've got coin-counting and sorting machines, along with water bowls for customers' dogs (Hill is a dog owner). He goes on:

But it's not just a series of gimmicks that's brought nearly half a million people to the bank, which only set up in the UK in 2010. The bank is open pretty much-year round (362 days), and runs until 8 p.m. on weekday evenings.

It doesn't seem to be competing largely on price: nobody at any point raised the interest rates offered on the accounts (though they are displayed prominently in the branch). It seems like they're betting that interest rates on most bank accounts are now so low that there's not very much to differentiate them.

The emphasis is almost totally on service and efficiency, and Hill says it's picking up business customers too:

That's one noticeable thing about Metro bank: as is understandable for a new bank, it doesn't have the legacy IT problems that older institution struggles with. Each desk has a Windows tablet to process new accounts, there's not a desktop computer in sight.

And with nothing holding them down, they're planning to float in 2016. CEO Craig Donaldson said recently that he'd like to see the bank in the FTSE 100 by 2019, and that's something Hill repeated:

So a few days after talking to Hill, I went back into the store to sign up for an account. I'm happy to be rid of my previous, unnamed bank. What's most interesting about Metro Bank is that I barely even needed to be convinced. Satisfaction with the big four banks is below 60%, so they're working with an extremely receptive audience already. If other people in the UK are anything like me, get used to Metro Bank.