By all means welcome news that Luqman Arnold, the man credited with the rescue of Abbey National, is poised to bid against Richard Branson in an auction for Northern Rock.
You will if you are a shareholder. But it is odd that the rump of the Geordie mortgage bank should attract the attention of two stunt merchants, albeit both tough and effective operators behind the hoopla.
Mr Arnold does not rival Branson in sartorial eccentricity.
He is bald, clean-shaven and crisply suited. But he was the first Footsie chief executive, so far as I know still the only one, to make a point of not wearing a tie when presenting his financial results to the City.
The bigger difference is that while Branson rarely misses an opportunity to perform a lark when there is a TV camera about, there is nothing larky about the way he expects his executives to run his businesses.
Virgin Money, which will take charge at the Rock if he wins, is a conventional personal finance operation that takes care not to alarm the customers.
Mr Arnold, by contrast, embarked on an elaborate publicity campaign at Abbey to "turn banking upside down".
Signs at the branches were deliberately hung the wrong way up.
There was a press conference in what looked like a stage set with chairs and tables hanging from the ceiling.
The theme was that Abbey (Mr Arnold dropped the "National") was nicer, more intelligible, than other banks, positively human. It had a set of twee pro forma letters for every occasion.
If you bounced a cheque, Mr Arnold's Abbey wrote something like "It may have escaped you that there is not enough money in your account to pay this cheque, so we are sending it back to you.
"If you have a moment to put the necessary money in your account, ask the person named on the cheque to bring it back to us and we will be delighted to pay it."
It caused great merriment among rival bankers and puzzled the punters.
Real banks were not like that. But it did punch home the message that Abbey was different, more different, indeed, that it could ever be in real life.
Still, for those that tried it there was a tidy, coherent range of accounts and products devised to suit people with various needs and circumstances.
It is unlikely that Mr Arnold would try that again at the Rock.
The world has gone electronic. Some HSBC branches seem to get by with no staff at all. Customers there seem entirely content to do their routine banking through a battery of clever machines.
Few write cheques nowadays, let alone bounce them.
Yet it was not upside down banking that transformed limping Abbey National into the robust Abbey that attracted a top-whack bid from the Spanish Santander.
That was done by extricating it from a disastrous foray into American bonds that nobody understood - yes, it has happened before.
This job Mr Arnold is said to have delegated largely to his finance director, Stephen Hester, who now runs British Land.
Financial finesse is what the Rock needs, too, whoever wins the auction.
