BoSI to offer longer opening hours and Saturday banking

Chrissy Quinn has a clear idea of what the 46 new Bank of Scotland Ireland (BoSI) branches will be like.

"The branches will be very open environments, very welcoming places, quite vibrant and dynamic in their colour schemes - very friendly," says the bank's new head of retail banking.

The 0 per cent finance dishwashers and microwaves assembled in the chain of electrical shops she has inherited as part of BOSI's €120 million deal with the ESB will have long been shipped out. But the customers who came to make those hire purchase repayments and pay their electricity bills will still come, she hopes, and pause to do more than just admire the decor.

Quinn is optimistic that a high proportion of the ESB's finance customers and over-the-counter billpayers - estimated to be somewhere around 185,000 people - will be attracted to the savings, personal loan, credit card and mortgage products the bank plans to launch shortly, ahead of the grand opening of its first branches.

The bank will open the first three branches - in Limerick, Ballyfermot and Dún Laoghaire - in December as "an early Christmas present" for Irish consumers. Many of the staff will be ex-ESB employees, who are undergoing training in a model branch built by the bank.

When Quinn says the branches will be very open places, she means it literally. Bank of Scotland branches will open at nine at the latest and close at five at the earliest on weekdays and will be open on Saturday morning. Branches located in shopping centres will open at 8am and be available until 8pm on certain nights.

"I'm living in Galway and I was in Eyre Square on a Saturday morning and I was just amazed that none of the main banks were open," says Quinn.

The bank has commissioned research suggesting 98 per cent of customers want banks to open after 4pm and 78 per cent want them to open before 10am. And, crucially, 40 per cent of those surveyed said they would switch their bank account to a bank with more suitable opening times.

But despite BOSI's increasing presence on Irish streets next year, people looking to switch their accounts from elsewhere won't be able to move to its books until late 2006, the current timescale for the launch of its personal current account. Full online banking is not on the agenda until 2007.

"We would love to bring it out sooner, but we had a choice to make," says Quinn. "The technology and systems needed for a personal current account are quite large. The issue was whether we would delay opening our branches or go ahead and open with a range of other products and wait until we have perfected our current account before launching it."

One potential problem for BOSI is that a handful of its fellow smaller players are becoming more aggressive, and, with existing fee-free current accounts, 100 per cent mortgages and branch networks, they may be more readily poised to take chunks of business away from the big two - AIB and Bank of Ireland.

In particular, National Irish Bank, now under Danske Bank's ownership, is expected to offer cut-price mortgages and spur fresh bouts of margin slashing. Bank of Scotland did much the same thing when it entered the mortgage market in 1999.

But Quinn believes the fact that "the big two" banks share over 70 per cent of the market means there is plenty of space for more than one smaller player to chip away at their dominance.

"At the moment, anyone coming into the marketplace with a compelling offer will be able to provide consumers with choice. We will make it very easy for customers to switch to us, which it hasn't been in the past."

Quinn's own most recent move has taken her from Halifax in the UK, which like Bank of Scotland Ireland is part of the HBOS group. She worked at Halifax for 18 years and most recently headed up its 107-strong branch network in London.

An English woman married to a Galway man, Quinn says she was lucky that the couple built a house here five years ago, making her change of job that bit easier.

In London, she headed up a mature business populated with experienced managers. Here, although it is already in the mortgage, asset finance and business banking markets, BOSI is essentially a start-up operation, run and staffed by people who claim not to be traditional bankers and see this as a good thing.

Quinn's current focus is recruiting area managers, but there are also some planning permission and site securing issues that need to be resolved in locations where the existing ESB shop has proved unsuitable for direct conversion.

BOSI wants to have at least three or four branches in both Dublin and Cork city centres.

The flagship branch will be on the ground floor of its headquarters building on Stephen's Green in Dublin, opposite the Luas stop. Quinn will also be responsible for the operation of a customer service centre in Dundalk.

With no white goods left to sell, the €80 million ESB FinancElectric loan book will eventually diminish, Quinn notes. "Our challenge is to offer compelling, competitive products as this happens."