Royal Bank of Scotland’ s conversion of its old executive wing into an entrepreneurial hub is symbolic of the bank’s transformation and will help drive growth in the Scottish economy, Ross McEwan has said.

The RBS chief executive said siting a new business ‘hatchery’ alongside outposts for key Scottish business organisations, in the Gogarburn headquarters building that was formerly closed even to most staff, showed that “head office is changing just as the bank has”.

Against a background of recent punishing falls in UK bank shares, on which Mr McEwan was not commenting yesterday, the chief executive told around 500 bank staff at the opening ceremony: “We now have one of the world’s greatest ecosystems that will help entrepreneurs really flourish in Scotland. If our customers are successful we will be successful and more important the Scottish and UK economies will be successful. I hope we will help ambitious entrepreneurs take their businesses to the next level.”

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said it was “quite a historic moment” and “a privilege to be here”. A building “which I hear was literally inaccessible to most people who worked here” had become “somewhere where we are quite literally creating jobs and growth in the Scottish economy”, she said. “A bank is moving back to some of the best traditions of Scottish banking, not just providing finance to customers and companies but having a stake in helping their success and growth.”

The Edinburgh business accelerator hub or hatchery is the ninth of 13 across the UK to be opened within RBS buildings, all stemming from a proposal by Sir Tom Hunter on behalf of the Entrepreneurial Spark incubator initiative begun five years ago in Ayrshire and Glasgow by Jim Duffy.

Mr Duffy said the partnership between e-Spark and RBS was “championing entrepreneurs throughout the UK”. In five years, e-Spark had supported 660 businesses with an aggregate turnover of almost £86million, attracted over £45m of investment, and created 1816 jobs. Most importantly, the hatchery businesses had a survival rate of 88per cent, compared with the average start-up rate of 40 per cent.

Alison Rose, head of commercial and private banking at RBS, said: “We also want our staff to become more entrepreneurial, and by putting the new hatchery at the heart of our Edinburgh HQ we want them to learn from the entrepreneurs and start thinking like them. This way they can understand our customers better and also help improve the culture of the bank.”

Sir Tom Hunter, injecting some levity into the hour-long proceedings, said: “What a brilliant thing, an entrepreneur brings an idea to a bank and the bank actually makes it better. Lets be frank, or lets be Fred, if I had pitched this idea to the previous CEO it wouldn’t have been given house-room.” The conversion of the executive wing had seen an end to “fancy fittings, the seafood bar, and the (CEO’s) white cat”.

He added: “Start-ups are good but scale-ups are great – it is the businesses that grow at more than 20 per cent a year that really move the entrepreneurial dial, that’s where we have got to get to next.”

The hatchery, opened in partnership with KPMG, offers ‘expert enablement’ to the 80 businesses who will join the programme every six months, as well as free office facilities.

The former executive wing now also houses RBS’s technology solutions centre, and desks for Entrepreneurial Scotland, Business Gateway, Napier University, Scottish Edge, The Princes Trust Scotland, The Lens, Big Noodle, Bright Red Triangle and We are the Future.