The bank that loves branches – and, no, it’s not in great financial shape

Image of the week: The hard place

“It’s not Northern Rock, but it’s in a hard place,” the Financial Times Alphaville blog declared this week of Metro Bank, the troubled British company that in 2010 became the first new high street bank to launch in the UK in more than 150 years.

There’s a reason new banks with service-focused branch networks don’t come along more often: these days, banking is all about apps and fintech, not what Metro Bank calls “people-people banking” and the novelty of having branches that are open seven days a week.

The challenger bank has secured vital new finance in the form of a £325 million (€377 million) capital raise and £600 million debt refinancing after a collapse in its share price and bonds left it struggling to survive, with the deal handing majority shareholder control to its biggest investor, the Colombian billionaire Jaime Gilinski. The bank also said it was in discussions about the sale of up to £3 billion of residential mortgages.

Metro Bank is now seeking to cut £30 million in costs a year, but the rescue package isn’t poised to fundamentally alter its high-cost and increasingly old-fashioned approach to business, with Gilinski insisting that the 76-strong branch network is “a model that works”.

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In numbers: All that glitters

$17,000

Apple’s 18-carat-gold limited edition of its first generation Apple Watch sold for as much as this back in 2015

8

Just eight years later, the product – like all of the original “Series 0″ Apple Watch models – is officially “obsolete”, according to Apple, with hardware support no longer provided. It stopped providing software support some years ago.

5

For many of its products, Apple is only obliged to supply parts for five years after the product is last distributed, giving the Apple Watch a planned obsolescence unheard of in the business of traditional watches.

Getting to know: Claudia Goldin

“I have always thought of myself as a detective,” says Claudia Goldin. Her golden retriever, Pika, would make an excellent sidekick for the New Yorker (77), should anyone wish to commission a television series based on the Harvard economic historian.

For now, Goldin will have to make do with being a Nobel-prize winning economist, having become only the third woman to receive the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel and the first woman to receive it solo.

“Being a detective means that you have a question and the question is so important that you will go to any end to find [the answer],” she says.

Using sources from sex-segregated job listings in the 1930s to 18th-century business directories, Goldin has devoted her career to explaining women’s lack of economic power, investigating both the causes of the gender pay gap in the labour market – they include outright discrimination – and ways in which it might be narrowed.

This won’t happen, she says, until there is equity between heterosexual couples when it comes to the division of unpaid caregiving and domestic labour. Time for a strike?

The list: Labour shop

UK Labour leader Keir Starmer was showered with glitter by a protester at his party’s annual conference in Liverpool this week, so unsurprisingly there are no protest-friendly glitter packets on sale in the official Labour Party shop. Here is what you can find, however.

1. Socks: Naturally. These ones, priced at £15, bear the words “Sock it to the Tories”, neatly encapsulating Starmer’s strategy at the next election through the medium of 80 per cent cotton.

2. A snood: Are snoods in fashion? It’s hard to keep up. This one in a Labour shade of red has been reduced to £3.50, though, so perhaps not.

3. Golf umbrella: This £30 effort could prove ideal for trundling round constituencies in the rain.

4. Starmer T-shirt: A unisex “sparkle with Starmer” T-shirt will set you back £20, but it will, according to the party, help you “unleash your inner shimmer”. Seems unlikely, but okay.

5. Clothes for mini-Starmers: The sober grey £5 children’s T-shirt reads “Future Labour prime minister” in what the shop describes as a “red glitter design”. So, courtesy of this late addition to the shop, there is some glitter after all.