Rick Warburton, the managing partner at Yorkshire Bank's Tees Valley Financial Solutions Centre discusses how the banking industry has adapted to business customers' needs, and why the "new" way of doing things may not be quite as radical as first thought

THEY said the internet would replace books and that online shopping would replace retailing, but the reality is that readers now use the internet to research immediate information, and there is a greater choice then ever of books for people to read in their armchairs.

Forward-thinking shops are also redefining themselves as "retail destinations", and using the net as another marketing channel to get traffic to their doors.

In a contrary way, the overall ease of data processing frees time for service providers to concentrate on old-style relationship-building with their customers. It's a kind of a back-to-the-future progression.

Banking has gone through a revolution, with more and more retail customers opting to bank online. But for business customers, the trend has returned to something that bankers of several decades back might recognise and approve of.

Business banking is all about relationships; personal knowledge and fast, local decision-making. The banker nowadays has to really understand the customer's business and the markets in which they operate and be able to add value, not just funding.

The trick is to use the best bits of the past and weave them in with the latest technology. It is all about keeping in tune with trends and customer expectations.

Traditional bankers offered a valuable mix of financial knowledge and community service, and it seems that at Yorkshire Bank, we are going practically full-circle in our offering to business clients. We have been able to revolutionise our service by going back to many of the things that banks used to do and becoming genuine partners to our customers.

We know that business customers need a different level of support to retail customers; from treasury and currency services in a global market, to first-class networking links with a range of other financial service providers. The Tees Valley Financial Solutions Centre has business experts empowered to make their own decisions at "branch" level, backed by a team of financial specialists whose knowledge is available directly to customers.

Technology has given us time back, and we choose to use that to regain a local and very human perspective on doing business.