I'm really quite surprised that no other bank has mounted a concerted campaign to "rescue" NW customers through a short-term incentive, allied with making account transfer easy. It makes me wonder whether they all have technology that would make such an assimilation difficult.

That's the most benevolent motivation I've seen attributed to banks for quite a long time. Oh, no, wait.

My Ulster Bank credit cards have had no problems at all that I am aware of.

It actually probably hasn't got anything to do with prioritising customers per se. But id does have to do with relative size of bank. I don't know what the numbers of customers accounts are, but it's probably tens of millions for NatWest and a bit less for RBS, vs. hundreds of thousands for Ulster Bank, and for efficient batch processing under time constraints you almost always kick off the big batches first and schedule the smaller ones to run when the large ones are done.

Possibly the priority is due to ASCII -- N = 4E hex, R = 52 hex and U = 55 hex. Computers like that sort of thing.

Thanks for the mention of my blog (joelormsby.blogspot) much appreciated.