I remember Girobank being known as National Girobank before the Government planned to flog it off.
National Girobank as the British Giro system brought Free Banking to the UK, and led the way, with other banks taking years to catch up.
National Girobank was originally under the National Giro brand before rebranding as National Girobank.
National Girobank was the first UK bank designed with computerized operation in mind, Europe’s first bank to adopt optical character recognition (OCR) technology, the first UK bank to offer interest-bearing cheque accounts, and the first European bank to offer phone banking several years prior to the start of First Direct.