TEN years on from the near-collapse that wiped out loyal employees’ shareholdings, paralysed the business ecosystem that had built up around it, and left its own reputation in tatters, it seems that Royal Bank of Scotland has decided it could do with a change of image.

According to news reports the bank, whose centuries’ old status as a canny Scottish institution was obliterated when, in October 2008, it received a multi-billion-pound bailout from the UK taxpayer, is considering ditching its RBS branding in favour of something a little less toxic.

According to chairman Sir Howard Davies, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England who has chaired RBS’s board for the past two years, use of the RBS name has now been placed “under review”. The reason, Sir Howard is reported as saying, is that as the bank has staged “one of the biggest corporate turnarounds in history” it is now “fully focused on building a much better bank for our customers”.

It is not the first time that the bank has tried to distance itself from the RBS moniker, with a 2016 decision seeing it drop the name from 500 branches across the UK in favour of Royal Bank of Scotland north of the Border and NatWest south of it. The plan now is to stop using it in a corporate context, which essentially means when trying to find institutions interested in buying its shares.

The thing is, RBS has come a long way in the past 10 years. Having grown into an unwieldy international behemoth under the leadership of former boss Fred “the shred” Goodwin, the business has slimmed down into something far more recognisable as a mainstream British bank. It has also taken some steps to right past wrongdoings by paying compensation to certain shareholders and customers who were affected by its actions.

Signs that RBS was finally starting to emerge from the wilderness came earlier this year when the institution made a profit then paid a dividend for the first time in a decade. When, in August, it agreed to pay £3.7 billion to settle a US Department of Justice investigation that had hung over it for the same period of time, RBS was able finally to draw a faint line under its past misdemeanours.

To rebrand now, just when City analysts think the bank is starting to look investable again, would seem almost as wacky as taking part in the £49bn take-over of a Dutch bank on which limited due diligence had been done. Indeed, while RBS may have been well advised to reinvent itself in the immediate aftermath of its bailout, it would seem there is no pressing need for it to do so now.

Sure RBS continues to be dogged by problems, as evidenced by it being labelled Britain’s worst bank for customer service by the Competition and Markets Authority and the worst for handling PPI claims by consumer group Which?.

Its decision to plough ahead with branch closures in the face of a significant public backlash has also done its reputation no favours, with the fact that other banks are doing exactly the same thing having no truck with a public that feels it has a vested interest in RBS thanks to the Treasury retaining a significant shareholding in it.

But these issues are small fry compared to what RBS has been through over the past 10 years, and as it is facing them from a position of relative corporate strength they are hardly worth reinventing itself for now. As brand expert Marc Cloosterman wrote in US publication Branding Strategy Insider in June, a business with a bad reputation may use a rebranding exercise to “ameliorate or dispel” negative associations if that reputation is “having a serious impact on its operating results”.

But with RBS seemingly well on the road to recovery the pressure on its brand has eased and, with investors liking nothing better than a company that is clearly on the up, surely it is only a matter of time before its brand is rehabilitated too.

That it is given the chance to do this is important not just for the bank but for Scotland as well. Like brand identity, national identity is a tricky concept to pin down, but it essentially revolves around how disparate groups of people use symbols and ideas to bind themselves to one another in an image of togetherness.

Being measured in our financial dealings has long been seen as an essential part of what it is to be Scottish, with the way we behave as individuals shaping our institutions and informing the way we are viewed by others. It is fair to say that RBS has been a huge embarrassment to Scotland, and rightly so, but that is because the country helped shape the bank’s reputation for canniness in the first place.

Planning to get rid of the RBS brand may be more about a bank that is now run from London wanting to distance itself from the nation whose image it helped to tarnish. But to obliterate a name we were once so proud of just when the institution behind it is starting to emerge as something better would be to do a disservice to all of us.