How has the board been supporting local businesses and regional growth this year?
Building networks
Accelerating regional growth is a key priority for our board. And it’s been great to have members of the NatWest Group executive involved this year once again in backing this ambition. During the summer, our Chief Operating Officer Jen Tippin and Chief Executive Officer for Retail Banking David Lindberg joined us for a lunch with external guests to discuss how the business community can work collaboratively and innovatively to unlock the region’s growth. In attendance were the CEOs of Greater Birmingham, Coventry & Warwickshire and The Black County Chambers of Commerce, various local leaders and one of our corporate customers. It was a great opportunity to collaborate, and we’re looking forward to continuing the conversation in a follow up meeting in November.
We believe that building networks is vital for creating a thriving, local commercial ecosystem. We are an active member of the Centre for the New West Midlands, which has been a great platform for building and strengthening regional contacts. As members we’ve been introduced to the new Mayor of the West Midlands and connected with The West Midlands Combined Authority. We then spend a lot of time collaborating with our contacts to participate in events that reach our communities.
Close to our customers
A great example of this is the Royal Norfolk Show in June. We were the only bank with a presence, and we certainly made our presence felt! We rallied local colleagues to make sure every customer-facing part of the bank was represented: corporate, retail, and private. We must have spoken with thousands of customers over the course of two days and had some great conversations. For me it really demonstrated what it means to be close to our customers.
Likewise, we were delighted to be involved in a celebration of our local South Asian entrepreneurs at our Birmingham accelerator hub back in August, in honour of South Asian Heritage month. We invited over 100 people from the local business community to network and share their entrepreneurial stories through a panel and discussion. It was such a hit that it made the news, and we’re hoping this encourages more members of the community to join the hub and kick-start their business.
These large-scale round tables, events and memberships are great for wider strategy, but they also grant us the opportunity to reach businesses on a smaller scale and support our customers one-on-one. My colleague was in conversation with a visitor at the Royal Norfolk Show who had a business query, and they said, “you wouldn’t happen to have an actual banker here to help me will you?”
Of course, we did. We were able to hand them straight over to a colleague from our Commercial Banking team for help. The visitor was genuinely surprised that we could help them, there and then.
