ROYAL Bank of Scotland has said supporting women in business and female entrepreneurs will be a key driver of economic growth for the UK, and the bank is well on the way to being run 50 per cent by women.

Chief executive Ross McEwan told the bank’s Women In Business event at Gogarburn that having aimed to put women in 30 per cent of the banks’ top 5,000 roles by 2020 it had already reached 42 per cent – and reaching its new target of a 50-50 split across the top 800 roles by 2030 would make RBS “a better bank”.

He said: “The days of setting women up to fail because you want a quota are finished. We want the very best talent in our business and making sure we have the best women will make us a better business.”

Mr McEwan revealed he had supported his daughter in starting her own restaurant business.

“When she set up her business there wasn’t one estate agent who would talk to her; she couldn’t get sponsors, couldn’t get people to ring her back.” But the restaurant had grown quickly to employ 23 people.

Mr McEwan said while the gender split might be 70 per cent female in areas such as personnel and marketing, it was only 10 per cent in investment banking, showing the bank had “a long way to go”.

Though billed as the main speaker, the chief executive instead gave way to the bank’s corporate and institutional banking director and most senior woman, Alison Rose, who said that as a career investment banker, she had often been “the only woman in a room of 50”.

Ms Rose went on: “Businesses run by women and organisations that have diversity and balanced gender rates are more successful and have better results. That is an enormous opportunity we are missing for the economy.”

She said the proportion of people in the UK who wanted to start a business was at an all-time high, but only 20 per cent of enterprises were started by women, and only 39 per cent of women felt they had the skills to do it. But if women matched men in business creation it would add one million entrepreneurs and generate an extra £6 billion for the economy by 2030.

“I want RBS to be the bank that women come to because they know we will support them to set up their business.”

She said the Entrepreneurial Spark hubs supported by RBS in nine centres, including inside the Gogarburn HQ, were not only achieving 88 per cent survival rates for start-ups, but a 50-50 gender split for the entrepreneurs.

One of the ESpark entrepreneurs Joanne Robinson, creator of the Little Art School company, said cashflow was the critical obstacle to a new business.

When trying to borrow £15,000 from a bank – to ease cashflow for a business with a forecast £10m turnover in 2020 – she had been told to “come back into the room and ask for a personal loan for a kitchen.”

Mr McEwan said: “We are not capital providers, we are debt providers for the most part.” Such risk funding would be “incredibly expensive” for the bank and RBS would direct entrepreneurs to other sources.

Lynne Cadenhead, chairwoman of Women’s Enterprise Scotland, said women had to seek help to battle an otherwise “lonely journey” and to “overcome the fear of failure and do the things you are afraid of.”