RBS boss Stephen Hester will not take bonus

The chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland has said he will refuse to take any bonus he could be offered at the end of this year, following severe problems the bank continues to face with its computer systems.

Stephen Hester told BBC Scotland that it would be inappropriate to accept a bonus, when the bank had failed to meet customers' expectations. While customers of RBS and its NatWest brand have returned to normal after four days of blocked access to accounts, disruption and transactions delayed, the Ulster Bank subsidiary continues to have problems 10 days on.

In the interview, Mr Hester also discussed investigations into the Royal Bank for manipulating the key interest rate for inter-bank lending, and for a finding by the financial regulator that it was one of four banks that have been mis-selling interest rate insurance products to business customers.

The chief executive said: "We're in an environment of high emotion around financial services where people are rightly disappointed about a number of aspects of the banks".

He also commented: "These kind of issues are important, they're big, they can be costly and they need to be fixed, and more importantly, the culture that drove them needs to be changed. I think we're well on the way to doing that. But banking is a big industry, it's an essential industry, and some of the fixes take more time than we wish".

"It's an industry that expanded incredibly fast and with great success over previous years, frankly got too proud of itself. It almost got too separated from society. People thought they were masters of the universe when they should have been servants of the customer".