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What will high street banks look like when the dust has settled on the current calamity?

Will the Royal Bank of Scotland eventually be sold off to a stronger rival? Will Lloyds Banking Group use and abuse its newly dominant market position, as the Office of Fair Trading fears it could?

And will a new entrant to the market sweep past them and grab market share?

If it's the latter, watch out for Benny Higgins.

Yesterday, he announced he's recruiting 200 staff to add to the 250 he already employs at the Edinburgh headquarters of Tesco Personal Finance.

That's some way short of the RBS total of nearly 180,000 employees.

His bank recently bought out the RBS share which has helped the supermarket giant build up its personal finance arm over the past 11 years.

Lost faith

It has been operating independently since December, while RBS still provides branded back office support under sub-contract.

And with the big banks shedding staff, Higgins can have the pick of the bunch as Edinburgh financiers look for somewhere new, fresh and going places.

Today, we saw figures for how much savings deposits have rocketed, as people have lost faith in troubled, longer-established banks and shifted their funds.

Not only Tesco has benefited from that - expect more news about that trend soon.

The Tesco Personal Finance chief executive is not one to crow about his strong position; without debt problems or government ownership, and with a customer-focused and trusted brand with a very large presence in every one of Britain's postal districts, along with expanding international reach.

It already has 5.5 million customers, and 28 financial products.

Being cautious

He told me on Monday that trust and building customer loyalty is going to be crucial to the Tesco offering.

But he is reluctant to set targets for how much it could grow.

He has done well out of being cautious, even if it lost him his last job.

He worked with Sir Fred Goodwin at the Royal Bank, and while he wasn't willing to discuss him this week, he has recently been quoted generously praising the former RBS chief executive.

More recently, Higgins was head of retail at HBOS under Andy Hornby and was pushed out two years ago as punishment for the loss of market share in the new mortgage market.

What followed at HBOS was the drive to win back that market share with the reckless lending that last week landed HBOS with billions of pounds of losses.

And while Andy Hornby is now the one out of a job, Benny Higgins has good reason to look pretty pleased with himself, quietly confident about Tesco's market strengths.