What’s in a name? If it is a name in the financial services sector, the right name can make all the difference, or so marketers and brand experts would have us believe.

The last few days have seen two significant name changes in the UK financial services arena.

One is the renaming of the government’s low-cost national pension scheme from personal accounts to the National Employment Savings Trust, or NEST.

In this case, the renaming looks to be an improvement as it clarifies what the new pension scheme is for.

The personal account name was bland and didn’t really explain the idea of employer and employee contributions going into a workplace pension to build up a pension.

NEST both spells out the overall idea and provides an attractive image of a safe, secure home for retirement savings.

The Personal Accounts Delivery Authority, which presumably will become NESTDA instead of being PADA, apparently conducted extensive research among employees to test the new name and it claims reactions were favourable.

On the downside, changing the name before personal accounts or NEST takes effect -scheduled be from late 2012 – risks causing confusion and smacks of an organisation seeking to find its direction.

But the reality is most ordinary employees won’t have heard of personal accounts, so changing names at this stage should not be a problem.

At the other end of a name’s lifecycle, this week sees the start of rebranding of the Abbey banking group – Abbey National, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley – as Santander.

Here, the strategy makes sense, particularly at the present time. The old brands have arguably been tarnished by the global financial crisis, with Bradford & Bingley being rescued by Abbey when it got into difficulties.

Furthermore, neither Abbey nor Alliance & Leicester are particularly strong brands, so the Spanish parent Santander feels it is the right time to move to a single brand for its UK operations, nearly six years after it acquired Abbey in November 2004.

At that time most Britons thought Santander was a port in Northern Spain rather than a financial powerhouse, but aided by moves such as its sponsorship deals with Formula One star Lewis Hamilton, Santander has steadily raised its profile in the UK and reportedly now has 92% brand awareness.

Of course, major name changes like this are not new. Midland Bank, one of the big four high street banks, became part of the HSBC empire under its single global brand 10 years ago and didn’t lose any customers when that happened.

One marketing expert commented on the disappearance of the Abbey name: “There is no consumer loyalty with these brands. I doubt anyone gives a monkey’s”.

Which begs the question, are there any brands in financial services which stand out in the same way as Gillette, Coke or Apple?

In the UK, it seems not, as virtually every financial services name seems to be at the mercy of corporate strategists.

For one thing, financial services firms don’t create the same warm feelings among customers and secondly, the sector has been tarnished lately and plenty of old names look as though they need a change of image. срочный займ как получить займ на картубыстрый займ краснодарзайм с плохой ки на карту