UPDATE: RBS officially names site for £2.5 million “flagship branch” in Inverness city centre amid mass Scotland-wide closures
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A savage round of Scotland-wide RBS branch closures is set to boost Inverness city centre with the opening of a new £2.5 million ‘flagship’ outlet facing onto Falcon Square.
The Inverness Courier can confirm negotiations have been successfully completed on locating the new RBS super-branch in currently unoccupied Eastgate Shopping Centre units.
The banking chain, owned by Natwest, announced on Wednesday evening a raft of 18 branch closures from 86 in Scotland by September, with the loss of 105 jobs nationally.
They included the Inverness chief office at Harbour Road and another branch on the upper floor of the Eastgate Shopping Centre.
But the mass restructuring, which RBS blames on a shift in customer habits towards online banking, has a silver lining for Inverness, with a merger of the two local branches into one visually-prominent city centre site.
It is understood the move will protect all existing RBS jobs within the city.
Eastgate Shopping Centre’s management welcomed news of the consolidated RBS presence as “massively positive” for the city centre economy.
Confirming the commitment to merge the branches at the Falcon Square site, a spokesman for the banking group said: “As part of these changes, we are making a significant investment in Inverness.
“£2.5 million has been allocated to develop a significant new flagship branch in Inverness, in a prime location near the Eastgate Shopping Centre, at Falcon Square.
“This branch will benefit from the introduction of new service points and technology to improve customer journeys within the branch.
“A new accessible events space will help us engage with both retail and business customers in new ways and will allow for easy access by car, with sufficient parking.
“Being located next to the train station means it is well connected to public transport options.
“This means that we will be closing two existing branches, RBS Inverness Chief Office and RBS Eastgate and consolidating these into our new Eastgate location.
“We are still working through our plans for the new branch, so we don’t yet have a closure date for these branches.”
The bank employs around 10,000 people across Scotland.
Most Scottish branches earmarked for cuts will close in the autumn, but a date has not been confirmed for closures in Inverness or for opening the new Inverness branch.
Announcing the national cuts on Wednesday, an RBS spokesman said: "Like any business, we strive to meet our customers' changing needs and expectations and we've been responding to the industry wide shift towards digital services.
“But we know that a small number of people are not yet comfortable with it, which is why we are proactively reaching out to support them with this transition, having made over 200,000 calls last year.
“We also have experts that they can speak to for support and guidance.
"While we are increasingly engaging our customers digitally, our branch network remains important to us.
“We commit to no further review of our Royal Bank of Scotland branch network until at least 2026.
"We are also investing c£10.5m in our network across Scotland as well as continuing to invest in shared solutions like the Post Office and banking hubs."
Chris Kershaw, manager of the Eastgate Shopping Centre, said: “From our perspective, it is massively-positive to keep RBS within the city and it will be great to have their flagship store brand within the Eastgate Centre.
“They provide a great service for customers throughout the area and keeping that within the centre is massively important to us.”
