Hi Sandra
Good question
Unless personal customers kept significant balances in their accounts; i.e. in the £000s then they were loss making. The costs involved are immense. Premises, staffing, supply and maintenance of ATMs, provision of sttements, cheque books etc are only a few of the costs off the top of my head.
Many of the personal accounts just have wages paid in then drawn out leaving a balance of 0 - i .e. just a public service. The only way to make these accounts profitable was to "cross-sell" other products such as mortgages, personal loans etc etc which is why the counter staff used to pester folk all the time. The other thing they did was to try to get them to take out Royalties accounts with a monthly fee for benefits most didn`t use.
I don`t think it was really the case that the business accounts subsidised the personal but as far as I know the business /comercial/corporate side of things was profitable (as it should be)
In RBS speak, the business sector is connections with annual turnover of up to £1m Within that, some business accounts (the minority) were very profitable (usually the cash rich) and others weren`t profitable with the majority inbetween, at least covering costs.
The whole thing about the Banks and why everyone is out to get them is that they made what was seen as being excessive profits but the public wasn`t really made aware that these "profits" were not from grass roots banking as we see it in Stranraer or Stornoway but from deals done in the "city" whether it be London or New York etc
If the RBS, HBOS etc had published two sets of results say, RBS High Street Bnaking and RBS Corporate, then the feeling that Banks are public enemy number one and should do everthing for nothing might not be so strong
The tragedy is , of course, that the profits were, it no transpires, numbers conjured up by these city whiz-kids so that they could make obscene bonuses so I guess no-one really knows, except for those inside the Banks how much (or how little I suspect) Banks make from day to day high street operations.
From the perspective of being a business customer myself, I must confess that I resent paying for banking services if you are a business and I think that the time is coming when all personal customers wil have to pay something as well.
