I can't get too excited about Santander’s Abbey rebrand. But maybe boredom is what the banks want these days.

As a customer of Abbey since god knows when, I wish I could tell you that I sprang from my bed this morning with a quickening sense of excitement about the prospect of my bank changing its name; that I poured the kids’ Cheerios into the bowl with a sense that bliss it was in Santander’s dawn to be alive. But I can’t. The truth is that this ‘momentous’ transition bores me stiff. But maybe that’s a good sign.

I don’t have any complaints about Abbey. Spain’s economy may be even more shot-to-pieces than ours, but Santander is supposed to be a solid, triple-A outfit and they haven’t allowed themselves any insane excursions along the lines of those crazed Icelanders. Me and Abbey (sorry, Santander) have a cool relationship in all senses of the word. It’s utterly impersonal – I don’t know anyone there by name, as one would have done back in the old days. They don’t get in my way and I stay clear of them. The monthly salary cheque goes in, and 30 days later, it’s all gone out again.

One only notices one’s bank when it screws up – “I’ll just go online and see how that Icesave high-interest account of mine is doing…What? Christ, it’s all disappeared!”  Abbey has kept its nose clean with me for a while. But even if they did incur my wrath, I can only imagine the hideous palaver involved if I ever left to sign up with one of the oppo – re-authorising all those wretched direct debits and standing orders. I’d spend half the rest of my days on this earth sorting out the mess on a bad line to Bangalore. That’s why many of us still have an account based in the university town where we went to college: pure inertia.  

But maybe utter boredom is what retail banks are now after. Excitement and banks are best kept well apart in 2010. We’ve had far too much excitement over the past couple of years from those in the finance game. (One reason why I’d steer clear of Branson’s new Beardy Bank - his own finances are about as transparent as a muddy lake.)

You can tell that back to humdrum basics is the new UK strategy for most banking outfits from the grim TV advertising campaign currently being run by Nat West. From the high street bit of the disgraced RBS, you get a 30-second spot showing a bunch of really boring bank tellers, balding salt-of-the earth types with tricky teeth, who smile a lot, ruffle the hair of small children and care deeply about their customers. None of these guys would know a credit default swap if it came up to them in the Bromley branch and punched them on the nose. And bonuses? What’s a bonus? They’re really happy just helping customers and driving around in that four year old Ford Focus for eighteen grand a year. Bit like teachers, road gritters or ambulance drivers, really. Here to help the community.  

It’s hardly the truth. But it’s a safe, acceptable line for battered banks to be peddling at the moment as they struggle to restore their reputations and their balance sheets.