Thank you for downloading the Bottom Line podcast. In this week's program, Evan Davis asks his panel of high-flying executives how far business has gone down the road of temporary staff and short-term contracts.

Hello and welcome to the bottom line. Now we're going to talk about temporary staff today, staff with few obligations and few entitlements, the employment equivalent of the

one-night stand. And beyond temp's, business generally looking for short-term relationships of

convenience, with loyalty gone and promiscuity the rule. We'll also hear how our guests keep score

of how well their companies are performing. But let us start by hearing a little about my three guests.

And first up is Michael Morley, who's chief executive of Coots, which is a private bank.

It's part of Royal Bank of Scotland.

Michael, it must be very annoying for you that everybody knows one thing about Coots, which is it's the Queen's Bank. Is it actually the Queen's Bank? Well, the relationship with the monarch goes back to George III, and it was actually Thomas Coots, who was one of the original founders, who prospected the monarch at that time, and he did a very good job, and we've been Bank of the Monat since that day. Of course, you're now publicly owned. I mean, 84% publicly owned in the UK. Has that made any different? For a short period of time in 2008, it did. And towards the end of that year, there was a period where some deposits went out of the organisation, but they actually came back really quickly. And today, our deposit holding base is stronger than it ever was before.

So I think the long-term answer is no. You could say it's one of the safest banks in the world.

What's the relationship to RBS? There's a lot of talk of ring fencing retail banks and you're a

posh retail bank really, aren't you? Ring fencing them from investment banks so that they

somehow can't be corrupted by or infected by problems in investment banks.

How arm's length are you from RBS?

All the discussion is on that path towards ring fencing.

The details are not quite decided yet, but I would expect some form of ring fencing would take place.

And I would anticipate that we will be part of that, but it's not yet decided.

Tell us a little bit about the actual activities.

Not anyone can get an account, really, can they?

We have 73,000 clients.

To start a relationship, it kind of needs to be a million pounds of deposits,

a million pounds of advised assets or a million pounds of lending.

So we set the benchmark quite high.

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