Company type | Subsidiary/Trading name |
---|---|
Industry | Financial services |
Founded | 1985 |
Defunct | 2011 |
Fate | Merged into Santander UK plc |
Successor | Santander UK plc |
Headquarters | Narborough, Leicestershire, UK |
Products | Banking, insurance |
Parent | Santander Group |
Website | www |
Alliance & Leicester plc was a British bank and former building society, formed by the merger in 1985 of the Alliance Building Society and the Leicester Building Society. The business demutualised in the middle of 1997, when it was floated on the London Stock Exchange. It was listed in the FTSE 250 Index, and had been listed in the FTSE 100 Index from April 1997 until June 2008.
After running into difficulty during the financial crisis, the bank was acquired by the Santander Group in October 2008, and transferred its business into Santander UK plc in May 2010.
It was fully integrated and rebranded as Santander by the end of 2011. [1] [2] The bank's international subsidiary based in Douglas, Isle of Man, Alliance & Leicester International, continued to use the name Alliance & Leicester, until it was fully merged into Santander UK in May 2013.
The Alliance & Leicester Building Society was formed by the merger of the Alliance Building Society (originally based in and called the Brighton & Sussex Equitable Building Society) and the Leicester Building Society on 1 October 1985. [3] In July 1990 the society acquired Girobank, a major provider of cash handling services to the government and large companies which also offered current accounts from the Post Office. [3]
With other large building societies such as Halifax and Woolwich, Alliance & Leicester decided to float on the London Stock Exchange, generating windfall payments to members worth up to £5,000 each. Flotation took place on 21 April 1997. [4]
From the end of the 1980s until the mid-1990s, Alliance & Leicester undertook a long-running television advertising campaign, featuring comedians Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. [5]
Alliance & Leicester had to be offered a secret £3 billion credit line by HM Treasury in November 2007 to prevent insolvency and a run on the bank. [6] [7] On 14 July 2008 the board of A&L recommended that shareholders accept a takeover bid from Banco Santander for around £1.26 billion. [8] This recommendation was ratified by shareholders at meetings on 16 September 2008. [9] The takeover took effect on 10 October 2008, when shares of the company were delisted from the London Stock Exchange. [10]
The bank transferred its business into Santander UK on 28 May 2010, following a hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice on 13 May 2010, as part of the procedure within the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. [11]
Until this time, Alliance & Leicester was run as a separate institution with its own banking licence while at the same time migrating customer accounts to the Partenon software system. [12] Abbey and the Bradford & Bingley savings business were rebranded in January 2010. Branches of Alliance & Leicester were rebranded at the end of 2010. [13]
The four business sectors were mortgage lending and investments, personal banking, commercial banking and treasury. Alliance & Leicester provided current accounts, general insurance, life assurance, unit trusts, asset financing and commercial lending. The bank also operated Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank. Credit cards were also provided through a partnership with MBNA until the acquisition by Santander.
Cards were subsequently reissued with MBNA branding, while Alliance & Leicester began solely providing Santander branded credit cards, provided by Santander Cards Limited. [14] [15] Selected investment products were also provided, together with those from Legal & General, with which the bank had a partnership.
Alliance & Leicester operated an international subsidiary based on the Isle of Man, which passed to Santander UK.
Between 2003 and 2007, Alliance & Leicester was the main kit sponsor of English football club Leicester City.
Halifax is a British banking brand operating as a trading division of Bank of Scotland, itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Lloyds Banking Group.
MBNA Corporation was a bank holding company and parent company of wholly owned subsidiary MBNA America Bank, N.A., headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, prior to being acquired by Bank of America in 2006.
The Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index, also called the FTSE 100 Index, FTSE 100, FTSE, or, informally, the "Footsie", is a stock market index of 100 of the most highly capitalised blue chip companies listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Northern Rock, formerly the Northern Rock Building Society, was a British bank. Based at Regent Centre in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom, Northern Rock was originally a building society. It demutualised and became Northern Rock bank in 1997, when it floated on the London Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol NRK.
The Abbey National Building Society was formed in 1944 by the merger of the Abbey Road and the National building societies.
Bradford & Bingley plc was a British bank with headquarters in the West Yorkshire town of Bingley.
National Girobank was a British public sector financial institution run by the General Post Office that opened for business in October 1968. It was initially called National Giro then National Girobank and finally Girobank plc, before being absorbed into Alliance & Leicester in 2003.
Banco Santander S.A. doing business as Santander Group, is a Spanish multinational financial services company based in Madrid and Santander in Spain. Additionally, Santander maintains a presence in all global financial centres as the 19th-largest banking institution in the world. Although known for its European banking operations, it has extended operations across North and South America, and more recently in continental Asia. It is considered a systemically important bank by the Financial Stability Board.
cahoot is an internet-only division of Santander UK plc, the British subsidiary of the Santander Group. Cahoot was launched in June 2000, as the internet based banking brand of Abbey National plc. Cahoot is based in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Virgin Money is a banking and financial services brand operating in the United Kingdom.
Bradford & Bingley International (BBI) was the international banking subsidiary of Bradford & Bingley, which was itself acquired by the Santander Group in 2008.
HBOS plc is a banking and insurance company in the United Kingdom, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Lloyds Banking Group, having been taken over in January 2009. It was the holding company for Bank of Scotland plc, which operated the Bank of Scotland and Halifax brands in the UK, as well as HBOS Australia and HBOS Insurance & Investment Group Limited, the group's insurance division.
In 2008 the Northern Rock bank was nationalised by the British government, due to financial problems caused by the subprime mortgage crisis. In 2010 the bank was split into two parts to aid the eventual sale of the bank back to the private sector.
Lloyds Banking Group plc is a British financial institution formed through the acquisition of HBOS by Lloyds TSB in 2009. It is one of the UK's largest financial services organisations, with 30 million customers and 65,000 employees. Lloyds Bank was founded in 1765 but the wider Group's heritage extends over 320 years, dating back to the founding of the Bank of Scotland by the Parliament of Scotland in 1695.
Alliance & Leicester International Limited (ALIL) was the international banking subsidiary of Alliance & Leicester, which was subsequently bought by the Santander Group in October 2008.
Santander UK plc is a British bank, wholly owned by the Spanish Santander Group. Santander UK plc manages its affairs autonomously, with its own local management team, responsible solely for its performance.
Cheltenham & Gloucester plc (C&G) was a mortgage and savings provider in the United Kingdom, a subsidiary of Lloyds Banking Group. C&G specialised in mortgages and savings products. Previously, C&G was a building society, the Cheltenham and Gloucester Building Society. Its headquarters were in Barnwood, Gloucester, Gloucestershire, England. C&G was closed to new mortgage and savings business on 9 September 2013.
Richard Lee Banks is a British banker who is Chief Executive of UK Asset Resolution, the state-owned "bad bank" that was formed from Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley, when those banks failed in 2008. In 2014, an opinion piece in the Evening Standard asked if he was "Britain's best banker", as he had successfully reduced the assets of UK Asset Resolution by 40 percent and repaid £4bn to the British government.
Virgin Money UK plc is a holding company that owns Clydesdale Bank plc, which in turn trades as Clydesdale Bank, Yorkshire Bank and Virgin Money in the United Kingdom. It was formed as CYBG plc by National Australia Bank (NAB) in February 2016, in advance of the divestment of its UK business through a stock market flotation. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and Australian Securities Exchange; it is also a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.