Shipping container bank approved by city

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Online financial services provider Tangerine has won the right to set up shop in a revamped shipping container at the entrance to Kildonan Place.

The City’s board of adjustment committee Wednesday night approved Tangerine’s request to open a temporary structure on a secondary pad site just off Regent Avenue.

The company, which used to be known as ING Direct, plans to use the location to promote its online banking operations and open up accounts. There will be no banking machine on site and employees will not handle any sort of cash transactions.

Andrew Wach, a local architect representing Tangerine, said he was happy with the committee’s green light but it wasn’t unexpected.

He took issue with critics’ description of the structure as a “shipping container with a port-a-potty.”

“It’s a fully compliant and insulated (structure) with windows.

There’s a bathroom inside. It’s got hot and cold water. It’s fully operational. This is not some toilet for a construction worker,” he said.

“It’s a very sophisticated piece of work. It’s certainly more sophisticated than virtually any RV on the road.”

Tangerine launched its first “branch-in-a-container” at a north Toronto shopping mall late last year. Since then it has followed suit in Calgary, Vancouver and Montreal and has plans to have about a dozen pop-up locations across the country.

The branch is not yet a fait accompli as there is still a more than two-week period in which the decision can be appealed. Coun. Russ Wyatt (Transcona) said he will do the honours.

He said he believes Scotiabank, which owns Tangerine, is taking a short cut in establishing the brand’s first physical location in Winnipeg.

“Other businesses follow rules with washroom standards, signage requirements, accessibility, building standards and landscaping standards at shopping malls. We’ve been working as a city to try to enhance and beautify existing areas by raising the standards. This (decision) is going in the exact opposite direction,” he said.

Wyatt said any business would jump at the opportunity to open on a street that gets more than 50,000 vehicles passing by every day but to allow Tangerine to do so while other businesses have to follow a litany of requirements is “simply unfair.”

“To recommend in favour of this is beyond bizarre. This doesn’t belong in Winnipeg, this belongs in Plum Coulee,” he said.

To emphasize his point at the meeting, Wyatt held up a can of tangerine-coloured paint.

“Tangerine belongs in a can of paint not in a massive can on the largest parking lot and shopping mall in northeast Winnipeg,” he said.

geoff.kirbyson@freepress.mb.ca