Royal Bank of Scotland has received an approach from 17 of the biggest investment institutions to buy 315 branches and their associated 2m customers for around £1bn - with a view to creating a serious new player in small-business banking. I've only been back for four days, and this is the second time I am banging on about Royal Bank of Scotland. Now I don't know whether that says more about the bruised largely nationalised bank or about me, but either way it may not be healthy. What has been brought to my attention is an interesting new way to hive off the 315 RBS branches, which the bank was on course to sell to Santander, before the UK arm of that Spanish giant dropped the deal.

RBS is not allowed to keep the branches and their £20bn-odd of deposits and loans - together with 1.7m retail customers and 230,000 small-business clients. The European Commission has ordered the disposal, as a remedy for the state aid received by RBS when British taxpayers bailed it out in 2008. And here's the thing: the deadline for the sale is November 2013 - though, arguably through no fault of its own, RBS has acknowledged that it is going to miss that deadline. Or perhaps it might not, if it and the government like the look and smell of a proposal being put to it by 17 very substantial investment institutions, including Schroders, Threadneedle, Foreign & Colonial, Henderson and Invesco Perpetual.....Read more here

RBS’s branch sale progresses to crunch meetings with investors.

The £1bn bid for Royal Bank of Scotland’s Williams & Glyn branches will gather pace as investors hold crunch meetings on Monday with Andrew Higginson, the man leading a takeover attempt.....Read more here