20 APRIL 1985, Page 18

Memory bank

NatWest's user-friendly idea of letting its customers choose cash-card num- bers which they can remember (City and Suburban, last wek) might be difficult for competitors to copy. Barclays, American Express, the Halifax and others have let- ters as well as numbers on their cash- dispenser keyboards, as with old-fashioned telephones: 2 ABC, 3DEF, and so on. The experience of American banks has been that when customers are given the choice of a four-figure code, almost all of them want the same number, 3825. The custom- ers may not be able to remember a number at all, but there is one word, of four letters, that they can remember.

Christopher Fildes