He appeared in a number of commercials, including voicing the griffin in advertisements for Midland Bank, now part of HSBC.

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Then again, that was when it was under Midland Bank control and more or less, left to its own highly profitable devices.

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BT, Midland Bank and Matsushita which will offer interactive services and provide a retail subsidy for the set-top boxes needed to decrypt digital signals.

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Midland Bank has been testing systems for Y2K compliance over the last year which resulted in cashpoints being shut down for two to three hours.

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For its part, HSBC was based in Hong Kong until 1992, when it bought Britain's Midland Bank as part of a strategy of global expansion.

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Helping HSBC's techno-ambitions is its size: it can spread the cost over eight major affiliate institutions, including Midland Bank, one of Britain's top four, and America's Marine Midland.

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Downtown Midland looks frozen in time circa 1983, when the oil bust and bank collapse brought construction to a standstill.

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That is, you were effectively paying the bank to hold your money in all those little branches of the Midland and the TSB.

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Headquartered in Midland, Michigan, Chemical Financial is a diversified financial services company, which operates through a single subsidiary bank, Chemical Bank.

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