If we don’t want banks running private-equity operations, why do we want private equity operations running banks? In the eagerness to come up with a new banking model for the post-crash era, we mustn’t simply welcome any alternative.

A host of new banks are being created to break up the existing monopoly and to present a new paradigm in finance. But surely banking is a business in which experience and track record are important and “new” is a negative rather than a positive.

If nothing else, people who flock to join a new bank may equally quickly move their money elsewhere.

The new banks include Virgin Money, which starts with a customer base and Richard Branson’s branding, but which hopes to expand enormously; Walton & Co, aiming at affluent people and small businesses; Metro Bank, the idea of a US entrepreneur; and Home & Savings, backed by the Blackstone private-equity group.

The FSA regulators will; presumably check that all these would-be bankers are honest and experienced and they are packing their boards with banking great and good. But is that a reason alone for transferring the family or corporate assets to them?

The one thing we know of Virgin Money, for instance, is that if it had succeeded in buying Northern Rock at the end of 2007, it would have wasted not only the money paid to that bank’s shareholders but would have had to inject billions over subsequent months as the extend of the crisis unfolded.

How many of these new banks have deep enough pockets to do that – apart from private-equity firms? These firms have no obligation to invest further anyway, but these are the firms that President Obama is trying to keep out of banking.

The regulators must not relax standards simply to encourage new banks to start. If anything, unproved and small banks need higher capital ratios that diverse established institutions.

The track record of new banks is not good. Adam & Co was launched in Edinburgh in the 1980s but, without the capital to cover its first significant loss, it was bought by Royal Bank of Scotland, one of the big banks it was designed to compete with.

There are lots of medium-size banks for sale – the bits of RBS and Lloyds the European Union has forced those institutions to sell, plus Northern Rock’s good business – but is it right for small or medium-size banks to buy them? And should the customers of those bank businesses being sold be forced to transfer from their current government-backed banking groups to unknown newcomers looking for growth?

If the UK banking monopoly is to be broken, then it is better that established foreign finance groups - such as Santander of Spain – or institutions such as insurance groups enter the UK market by acquisition or by establishing new operations. And it is better that customers have a choice of moving to a new bank, such as Tesco’s.

But we should not automatically assume that new is better: in banking, the villains we know may be better than the upstarts we don’t.

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