Smartphones, online connectivity and 24/7 payments are so commonplace in the UK that it takes an object from a bygone era to show just how far banking technology has come. Kevin Brown, a managing director at RBS International Banking, has one such memento: a tone pad. Because it seems so antiquated, he has to explain its purpose.
It is from 1986 and NatWest’s launch of phone banking. Although Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street had a mobile phone at this time, albeit it a brick-sized one, the bank’s customers were still using landlines, and many did not have tone-dial phones and were still wheeling their fingers around a dial to place a call. The bank issued its customers with tone pads, which were held over the receiver so numbers could be pressed to produce a corresponding tone for the service to capture on the other end.
