ROYAL Bank of Scotland chief Ross McEwan has admitted the institution’s branch-cutting programme has been difficult for customers, while warning over the threat to revenue posed by Brexit.

The state-backed lender swung the axe on 60 branches on Scotland – more than one-third of its total – in its most recent wave of closures in late 2017. It emphasised the continuing, dramatic reduction in branch numbers at the bank, which had more than 300 in 2013.

Speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference yesterday, Mr McEwan conceded the shrinking of the network had not been popular but defended the strategy in light of the shift towards digital banking.

Mr McEwan said: “We have made some very big decisions around the shape of our business that customers have not always enjoyed, but if we hadn’t made those changes it would have been slicing and dicing for the next five years, particularly around our branch network.

“And our view was, get it into a shape that we can say to people [that] for ’18, ’19, and looking into ’20, we don’t see any changes here, we haven’t got anything planned, which gives certainty to customers. But it does impact your SME (small and medium-sized enterprises) and your personal customers.”

Meanwhile, Mr McEwan repeated his warning that Brexit was a threat to revenue and making it more difficult to meet its target of reducing its cost to income ratio to less than 50 per cent by 2020. He said: “We run to consensus [on economic growth]. Last year consensus said that this year would be about 1.5 to 1.7 per cent growth. We are now seeing that drop down to about 1.2%. That is just sheer uncertainty about what is going on in this marketplace given Brexit. You are seeing larger corporates who have lines – they are just not drawing on them, or they have got plans and they are just sitting waiting to see what the outcome is.”