It sounds like banking from a lost age. “The way to build business is to go and see the customer,” says Jeronimo Ramos, a director at Banco Real in São Paulo. “A good interview is a whole day spent visiting the customer’s business and talking to their neighbours.”

However, Mr Ramos is not talking about the majority of customers at Banco Real, part of Spain’s Santander group since 2007. Real’s mostly middle-class customers, should they apply for a loan, will be sized up by the bank’s automated credit risk systems.