Breaking News UK: RBS boss sets out plans for better customer service after complaints made

Ross McEwan pledges to speed up lending decisions and stop doing things not in customers’ interest

The new boss of Royal Bank of Scotland has begun to set out how he intends to put customers at the heart of its operations after a string of damaging allegations about the bailed-out bank’s treatment of customers.

Ross McEwan, promoted to run the 81% taxpayer-owned bank in October, writes in the Guardian on Monday that he intends to speed up lending decisions and stop doing things that are not in the interest of customers.

The New Zealander is expected to set out his strategy in a fortnight when the bank publishes its results for 2013 – expected to show a £8bn loss – and the outcome of his Project Cook review to cut costs and possibly more jobs at the bailed-out bank.

In a comment piece in the Guardian he promises to put the customer at the core of its business as he tackles the complex organisation that was bailed out in 2008, and admits that RBS needs to change, saying: “The lessons from the past are clear. In the rush for growth and profit, RBS forgot what banking is about. The bank valued least the people it should have valued most: its customers.

“We sold them products like PPI that many didn’t need, and in some cases didn’t know they had. Our customers often felt confused by language they found difficult to understand. We wasted their time with needless bureaucracy. We literally and metaphorically put them at the back of the queue.”

McEwan is attempting to restore the bank’s relationship with small-business customers after entrepreneur Lawrence Tomlinson compiled a dossier alleging the bank deliberately drove customers to the brink to buy their properties off them. Retail customers have been angered by a series of IT glitches and missold payment protection insurance.

He makes references to bonuses during what is a particularly contentious annual round of bonuses in light of the EU bonus cap. McEwan waived his own bonus to avoid “pay drama” but on New Year’s Eve was handed £1.5m in shares after signing a deal 18 months ago when he was hired from Australia to run RBS’s retail bank by his predecessor, Stephen Hester.

Jill Treanor