PhillyDeals: Banking on England

LONDON - When he was building 400 offices from New England to Florida, Vernon Hill used to brag "it never rains on a Commerce Bank branch opening."

England is different, I thought, reaching London in a December sleet storm to check on Hill's new British start-up, Metro Bank P.L.C., I figured London workers might not tolerate his long hours and his demands that they keep busy. Competitors won't stand for his cheeky insults. Regulators won't bless his push-back, his contempt for "stupid rules," his hiring of his wife.

Plus it rains here. A lot.

But as I left the Piccadilly Underground for the busy High Street shopping district in the polyglot Hounslow neighborhood and found Hill's new glass-front Metro branch, behind grand-opening stilt-walkers, popcorn girls, trained dogs, a Caribbean/Asian steel-drum group playing "Take Me Home, Country Roads," the rain stopped.

Soon the midday sun lit crowds of Christmas shoppers pressing through Metro's open doors. The place was jammed. Clerks opened accounts and rented safety-deposit boxes nonstop. Most everyone was smiling.

How did he do that? And how's he going to make this turn a profit?

Going native

But mostly, Hill has gone native. He's joined British banker Anthony Thomson as a partner. He's raised tens of millions of pounds from investors, including real estate developers David and Simon Reuben and Richard LeFrak.

And he has hired British banking veterans such as chief executive Craig Donaldson and retail boss Christopher Brindley, both quick North of England men with choppy accents, the U.K. equivalents of the Philadelphia Irish and Italian parochial-school grads Hill relied on at Commerce.

"I'm a northern boy who grew up over my father's pub in a pit village," Donaldson told me. (That means a practical education in a mining-town bar.) He worked at Barclays, then Royal Bank of Scotland, where he "had the joy" of managing government relations as the U.K. took over the bank in the 2008 credit crisis.

Donaldson had studied "the Commerce model" and proposed it to his board but got nowhere. Then Hill called: "Rather than trying to copy my model, why don't you come over here and work with me?"