In the understatement of the week, Ross McEwan, the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, has said there is still a lot of work to do to return the bank to health. Mr McEwan was speaking as his bank posted a £134million operating loss for the third quarter of the year. He also said there was no realistic prospect of returning to dividends or share buybacks before the first quarter of 2017.

The explanation for this situation is familiar: RBS still has billions to pay in misconduct charges, most infamously PPI, but the bank is also being investigated in the United States over claims it misled investors in mortgage-backed securities. Before the end of the year, there will also be the review of the bank's treatment of small business and the allegations that it sought to deliberately push some of them into bankruptcy.

Mr McEwan was always going to have a hard job coping with this legacy, and the bank cannot move forward until it has dealt with the problems of the past. But if the chief executive is to return RBS to long-term health and genuinely transform the kind of bank it is, and how it is perceived, he will have to do more than offer a strategy of cuts. Tens of thousands of jobs have gone already and there have been hundreds more this year. Hundreds of branches have been closed too, and there will be more to come. In fact, the bank says it is only half way through its £5bn restructure.

Some of this restructure and change was inevitable, particularly with more and more customers banking almost exclusively online. Mr McEwan has also embraced the possibilities of new technology as a way of bridging the gaps left by shut-down branches. And prudence has been showing in increasing the bank's capital levels and ridding it of some of the assets it acquired at its height.

But RBS has more work to do to convince customers the bank has changed and has a plan for the future. Bonuses, for example, are still an everyday expectation at the bank and while the idea of a smaller bank with a focus on customers is the right way to go, it is hard to see how that can be achieved when staff numbers are continuing to fall so dramatically. Mr McEwan says the focus of RBS is not to be the biggest, it is to be the best, but cuts alone will not achieve that.