Royal Bank Of Canada Completes Channel Islands Restructure

by Carla Johnson, Investors Offshore.com

14 September 2001

According to reports from the This Is Guernsey online news service, the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) has finally completed the reorganisation of its Jersey and Guernsey operations two years after the plan was drawn up. Senior vice president and regional head of the RBC Global Private Banking for the British Isles, Philip Brewster, told This Is Guernsey: 'This is the shape of things to come. Running two separate banks in Guersey and Jersey didn't make a whole lot of sense. We had two of everything, two banking systems, two adminstration groups, we even had two sets of reports and accounts.'

He added: 'By restructuring the two banking units, and combining them together into a branch structure, we have the best of both worlds; clients can be serviced from either location but with a common infrastructure.'

RBC has been established in Guernsey as a private bank since 1975 and bought the Jersey operations of the Royal Trust Company of Canada in 1993. RBC says it had plans to merge the two operations in 1999 but issues surrounding the Y2K changeover delayed the plans until mid-2000.

Mr Brewster explained the benefits of the merger: 'We now have a larger and more efficient administration capability that can handle more transactions with greater accuracy. This means the relationship manager can spend more time with the client and less time on the paperwork. We're also able to roll out our Internet services to a wider group of clients - a service we know they want.'

Under the reorganisation of the banks, RBC now has a bank based in Guernsey and the bank in Jersey is now an RBC branch. Between them, the operations have a deposit base of £3.5 billion.

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