When we last checked in on Vernon Hill almost two years ago, he had taken the millions he'd made in community banking in the U.S. and launched an effort to replicate his previous success on the mother ship: the U.K. He said he was done with the U.S. because Dodd-Frank, CRA, BSA, AML, and other regulations on the federal, state, and local levels were grinding down community banks to the nub while making the biggest banks even bigger. He saw the U.K. as a land ripe for the picking by offering customers what they weren't getting from their big banks: customer service.
It seems that for Mr. Hill, so far, so good.
...Metro Bank now has 1.1million customers and almost 50 branches.
More stores are opening outside of the South East, with 10 to 15 to opened in the Midlands over the next two year - by 2020 Metro Bank aims to have more than 100 outlets.
Mr Hill said: "If we're not in your town - we will be soon."
Hill insists that his bank does not compete with Britain's big banks on price, but solely on service.
His "stores" "are designed to be open and transparent, with glass fronts that are more like supermarkets than traditional bank branches."
Opening hours are until 8pm on weekdays, staff are not kept behind glass fronts - and dogs are welcome.
Mr Hill said: "The banks won't let you bring your dogs in, for some unknown reason. We want your dogs in - the customers take that to mean: if you love my dog, you must love me."
Hill claims that the big banks in the U.K. "take you for granted."
"Metro Bank is completely the reverse of that, it's about service, it's about convenience, it's about killing every stupid bank rule you can find."
"Killing every stupid bank rule you can find." That sounds pretty much like the Core Principles announced by the Trump administration (and expanded upon in the Treasury Department report issued a few months ago), and also embodied in the the Financial Choice Act passed by the House. How ironic, and sad, that in a country that appears to outsiders to be home to a lot more of the apparatus of the Nanny State than inhabits even the fevered utopian dreams of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, a free-market-besotted Yank is making money and growing a super-community banking organization by replicating what used to work in this country: putting the customer first and cutting red tape wherever possible.
Speaking of the Trump administration, Hill thinks that the "banking revolution" he's trying to foster is part and parcel of the Trump and Brexit phenomena.
The Brexit vote and election of Donald Trump were part of the same phenomenon against the engrained, according to the American businessman.
And Metro Bank is also a "disruptor" taking on Britain's biggest bank providers - Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC, RBS and Santander, Mr Hill said.
His challenge to the established banks started in 2010 with a slogan that calls on Britons to "join the revolution" and an aim to put customers at the heart of everything the bank does - or in Mr Hill's words create "fans" of the company.
He told Express.co.uk: "This clearly a different model and the customers have responded to it - we're actually nice to them!"
I have no idea whether Hill's success, Trump's election, and the Brexit vote are tied by even the slightest tether, but I do know that I burst out laughing when I read that last line. What a revolutionary marketing concept: "We're actually nice to them!"
I wish Vernon Hill well. I'll be keeping my eye on him to see how all this "revolutionary niceness" pays off.