AFTER playing football for Celtic youth team and getting a first class degree in maths, Benny Higgins has gone on to make a big impression on the banking industry in Scotland.

He has run Tesco’s bank business since 2008 and before that held big jobs at Standard Life, Royal Bank of Scotland and the former HBOS.

At Royal Bank his responsibilities included leading the integration of the giant retail banking network it acquired through the £21 billion hostile takeover of NatWest in 2000.

The numbers suggest his time at Tesco has been productive.

The bank has around eight million customer accounts across a range of products, against 5.8m when he took charge. It can claim to be mounting a serious challenge to the giants that have long dominated the industry.

Employee numbers have increased from 200 to 4,000 under Mr Higgins. The growth has been good news for Scotland, where 3,100 are based.

Job creation by Tesco helped offset the cuts made by the likes of Royal Bank for some time.

But the bank was facing big challenges even before the disruption caused by the cyber attack it had to deal with in November.

The move into the key customer account market was delayed until 2014, partly due to the scale of the work involved in building the required systems.

Mr Higgins noted yesterday how hard it is to get people to switch current account providers, even for a bank with the mighty Tesco group’s marketing savvy to draw on.