Nick Goodway: Bank bosses must insist their EU workers are able to stay here

Royal Bank of Scotland is still to make a hefty settlement of several billion dollars with US authorities over its involvement in selling mortgage-backed securities, which partly led to the global financial meltdown. Others may find legacy issues still lurking in their cupboards.

Attention will also focus on technology. As customers switch more rapidly from branch to online and mobile banking, the robustness of the IT systems that serve them, and their fallibility to cyber-attacks, are increasingly at the front of regulators’ minds.

But the big difference between this set of results and those of the first quarter is, of course, the result of the referendum and the decision of the UK to leave Europe.

While that will have had a slight impact on those results for the six months to the end of June (lower investment by worried companies, slower spending by nervous consumers), it is what the banks have seen and heard since that fateful day which matters.

Several of our bank bosses, such as Ross McEwan at RBS and Antonio Horta-Osorio of Lloyds, are pretty good at telling it as it is —and have their ear well attuned to what their clients are saying, thinking and doing.

They will not hide behind the “it’s too early to say” excuses, and my guess is they will talk about a slowdown but not a full-blown recession.

What I am also hoping to hear is a robust case for their hundreds of employees who hail from the European Union. And I’m not referring just to the highly-paid investment bankers from France or Italy.

I am talking about the many east Europeans who work in branches and back offices and make our everyday banking as pleasant as it can be.

As bankers, they also have a strong voice on behalf of all their business clients. They too want to reassure their European employees.

Bank bosses have a duty to tell the Government it must guarantee that those Europeans who are here can stay. It must also tell those who might still want to come that there is not going to be some arbitrary cut-off date before Article 50 has even been triggered.