In a move designed to help restore clients’ trust, a major U.K. bank is scrapping incentive pay for frontline staff and boosting salaries instead.
The Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc announced on Thursday that its two major banking subsidiaries, NatWest and RBS, are scrapping incentives for their customer-facing staff in both their personal and business banking divisions, as of January 1, 2016.
The change is intended to ensure that employees based in branches, in call centres, or otherwise dealing with customers, are solely focused on the customers’ needs, the bank said.
“We want to become a stronger, simpler and fairer bank and be the number one for customer service, trust and advocacy,” said Les Matheson, CEO of personal and business banking at NatWest and RBS, in a statement announcing the move.
“We’re determined to keep doing things differently but we can only continue to rebuild our customers’ trust if they truly believe that we are focused on helping them with their financial needs. This is why we are scrapping all incentives for customer-facing employees in our personal and business banking business,” he said.
Matheson noted that employees will not lose out as a result of the change in policy. “They will receive anincrease to their annual base pay and the way we pay them will be simpler and fairer,” he said.