A building society is a financial institution owned by its members as a mutual organization, which offers banking and related financial services, especially savings and mortgage lending. They exist in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, and formerly in Ireland and several Commonwealth countries, including South Africa as mutual banks.[1] They are similar to credit unions, but rather than promoting thrift and offering unsecured and business loans, the purpose of a building society is to provide home mortgages to members. Borrowers and depositors are society members, setting policy and appointing directors on a one-member, one-vote basis. Building societies often provide other retail banking services, such as current accounts, credit cards and personal loans. The term "building society" first arose in the 19th century in Great Britain from cooperative savings groups.
In the United Kingdom, building societies compete with banks for most consumer banking services, especially mortgage lending and savings accounts, and regulations permit up to half of their lending to be funded by debt to non-members, allowing societies to access wholesale bond and money markets to fund mortgages. The world's largest building society is Britain's Nationwide Building Society. In Australia, building societies also compete with retail banks and offer the full range of banking services to consumers.
History in the United Kingdom
Building societies as an institution began in late-18th century Birmingham – a town which was undergoing rapid economic and physical expansion driven by a multiplicity of small metalworking firms, whose many highly skilled and prosperous owners readily invested in property.[2][3] Many of the early building societies were based in taverns or coffeehouses, which had become the focus for a network of clubs and societies for co-operation and the exchange of ideas among Birmingham's highly active citizenry as part of the movement known as the Midlands Enlightenment.[4] The first building society to be established was Ketley's Building Society, founded by Richard Ketley, the landlord of the Golden Cross inn, in 1775.[5] Members of Ketley's society paid a monthly subscription to a central pool of funds which was used to finance the building of houses for members, which in turn acted as collateral to attract further funding to the society, enabling further construction.[6] By 1781 three more societies had been established in Birmingham, with a fourth in the nearby town of Dudley; and 19 more formed in Birmingham between 1782 and 1795.[7] The first outside the English Midlands was established in Leeds in 1785.[8]
Most of the original societies were fully terminating, where they would be dissolved when all members had a house: the last of them, First Salisbury and District Perfect Thrift Building Society, was wound up in March 1980.[9] In the 1830s and 1840s a new development took place with the permanent building society, where the society continued on a rolling basis, continually taking in new members as earlier ones completed purchases, such as Leek Building Society. The main legislative framework for the building society was the Building Societies Act 1874 (37 & 38 Vict. c. 42), with subsequent amending legislation in 1894, 1939 (see Coney Hall), and 1960.
In their heyday, there were hundreds of building societies: just about every town in the country had a building society named after that town. Over succeeding decades the number of societies has decreased, as various societies merged to form larger ones, often renaming in the process, and other societies opted for demutualisation followed by – in the great majority of cases – eventual takeover by a listed bank. Most of the existing larger building societies are the result of the mergers of many smaller societies.
All building societies in the UK are members of the Building Societies Association. At the start of 2008, there were 59 building societies in the UK, with total assets exceeding £360 billion.[10] The number of societies in the UK fell by four during 2008 due to a series of mergers brought about, to a large extent, by the consequences of the financial crisis of 2007–2008. There were three further mergers in each of 2009 and 2010, a demutualisation and a merger in 2011, and four further mergers 2013–2018 which resulted in there being only one building society headquartered respectively in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Since then, the only merger has been in 2023, when the Manchester society merged with the Newcastle society.
In the 1980s, changes to British banking laws allowed building societies to offer banking services equivalent to normal banks. The management of a number of societies still felt that they were unable to compete with the banks, and a new Building Societies Act was passed in 1986 in response to their concerns. This permitted societies to 'demutualise'. If more than 75% of members voted in favour, the building society would then become a limited company like any other. Members' mutual rights were exchanged for shares in this new company. A number of the larger societies made such proposals to their members and all were accepted. Some listed on the London Stock Exchange, while others were acquired by larger financial groups.
The process began with the demutualisation of the Abbey National Building Society in 1989. Then, from 1995 to late 1999, eight societies demutualised accounting for two-thirds of building societies assets as at 1994. Five of these societies became joint stock banks (plc), one merged with another and the other four were taken over by plcs (in two cases after the mutual had previously converted to a plc).
As Tayler (2003) mentions, demutualisation moves succeeded immediately because neither Conservative nor Labour party UK governments created a framework which put obstacles in the way of demutualisation. Political acquiescence in demutualisation was clearest in the case of the position on 'carpetbaggers', that is those who joined societies by lodging minimum amounts of £100 or so in the hope of profiting from a distribution of surplus after demutualisation. The deregulating Building Societies Act 1986 contained an anti-carpetbagger provision in the form of a two-year rule. This prescribed a qualifying period of two years before savers could participate in a residual claim. But, before the 1989 Abbey National Building Society demutualisation, the courts found against the two-year rule after legal action brought by Abbey National itself to circumvent the intent of the legislators. After this the legislation did prevent a cash distribution to members of less than two years standing, but the same result was obtained by permitting the issue of 'free' shares in the acquiring plc, saleable for cash. The Thatcher Conservative government declined to introduce amending legislation to make good the defect in the 'two-year rule'.
1980s and 1990s
Building societies, like mutual life insurers, arose as people clubbed together to address a common need interest; in the case of the building societies, this was housing and members were originally both savers and borrowers. But it very quickly became clear that 'outsider' savers were needed whose motive was profit through interest on deposits. Thus permanent building societies quickly became mortgage banks and in such institutions there always existed a conflict of interest between borrowers and savers. It was the task of the movement to reconcile that conflict of interest so as to enable savers to conclude that their interests and those of borrowers were to some extent complementary rather than conflictive. Conflict of interest between savers and borrowers was never fully reconciled in the building societies but upon deregulation that reconciliation became something of a lost cause. The management of building societies apparently could expend considerable time and resources (which belonged the organisation) planning their effective capture—of as much of the assets as they could. If so, this is arguably insider dealing on a grand scale with the benefit of inside specialist knowledge of the business and resources of the firm not shared with outsiders like politicians and members (and, perhaps, regulators). Once the opportunity to claim was presented by management the savers in particular could be relied upon to seize it. There were sufficient hard-up borrowers to take the inducement offered them by management (in spite of few simple sums sufficing to demonstrate that they were probably going to end up effectively paying back the inducement). (Tayler 2003)
Management promoting demutualisation also thereby met managerial objectives because the end of mutuality brought joint stock company (plc) style remuneration committee pay standards and share options. Share options for management of converting societies appear to be a powerful factor in management calculation. Rasmusen (1988) refers to this in the following terms:
" ... perks do not rise in proportion to [mutual] bank size. If a mutual is large, or is expected to grow if it can raise capital by a conversion, its managers derive more value from a conversion but do not suffer much loss of perks than if the bank were small. Their benefit is in the right to purchase the new stock, which are valuable because the new issues are consistently underpriced [referring to USA mutual bank conversions]. Moreover, by no means are all mutual managers incompetent, and conversions allows the bank to expand more easily and to grant executive stock options that are valuable to skilled managers".
Instead of deploying their margin advantage as a defence of mutuality, around 1980 building societies began setting mortgage rates with reference to market clearing levels. In sum they began behaving more like banks, seeking to maximise profit instead of the advantages of a mutual organisation. Thus, according to the Bank of England's Boxall & Gallagher (1997):
"... there was virtually no difference between banks and building society 'listed' interest rates for home finance mortgage lending between 1984 and 1997. This behaviour resulted in a return on assets for building societies which was at least as high as Plc banks and, in the absence of distribution, led to rapid accumulation of reserves".
"... accumulation of reserves in the early-1990s, beyond regulatory and future growth requirements, is difficult to reconcile with conventional theories of mutual behaviour".
Llewellyn (1996) draws a rather more direct and cynical conclusion:
By adopting a policy of building up reserves by maintaining an excess margin, building societies simultaneously allowed banks to compete and may have undermined the long run viability of mutuality. A more cynical approach is that some societies may have adopted an excess-margin strategy simply to enhance their value for conversion.
Some of these managements ended up in dispute with their own members. Of the first major conversion of the Abbey in 1989, Kay (1991) observed:
[T]he paradox of the Abbey members who campaigned against flotation [conversion to a shareholder-owned bank] of their building society. They were fighting to preserve a degree of accountability to the membership which the management of the Society patently did not feel. For incumbent management, the contrary views of some of their members were not matters to be weighed in the balance and taken account of in formulation of policy. They were a nuisance to be dealt with by the costly use of public relations advisers and legal processes.
In the end, after a number of large demutualisations, and pressure from carpetbaggers moving from one building society to another to cream off the windfalls, most of the societies whose management wished to keep them mutual modified their rules of membership in the late 1990s. The method usually adopted were membership rules to ensure that anyone newly joining a society would, for the first few years, be unable to get any profit out of a demutualisation. With the chance of a quick profit removed, the wave of demutualisations came to an end in 2000.
One academic study (Heffernan 2003) found that demutualised societies' pricing behaviour on deposits and mortgages was more favourable to shareholders than to customers, with the remaining mutual building societies offering consistently better rates.[11]
Prior to 31 December 2010, deposits with building societies of up to £50,000 per individual, per institution, were normally protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), but Nationwide and Yorkshire building societies negotiated a temporary change to the terms of the FSCS to protect members of the societies they acquired in late 2008/early 2009. The amended terms allowed former members of multiple societies which merge into one to maintain multiple entitlements to FSCS protection until 30 September 2009 (later extended to 30 December 2010), so (for example) a member with £50,000 in each of Nationwide, Cheshire and Derbyshire at the time of the respective mergers would retain £150,000 of FSCS protection for their funds in the merged Nationwide.[12] On 31 December 2010 the general FSCS limit for retail deposits was increased to £85,000 for banks and building societies and the transitional arrangements in respect of building society mergers came to an end.
↑ If customer resides within their "operating area".
Demutualised
Ten building societies of the United Kingdom demutualised between 1989 and 2000, either becoming a bank or being acquired by a larger bank.[16][17] By 2008, every building society that floated on the stock market in the wave of demutualisations of the 1980s and 1990s had either been sold to a conventional bank, or been nationalised.[17]
Became a division of Bank of Ireland but its savings balances and branch network transferred to Britannia Building Society in 2005 (which in turn merged with Co-operative Financial Services). Bristol & West mortgages ceased trading in January 2009.[18]
Now part of Barclays plc. Woolwich brand name now only used for mortgages from Barclays with the Woolwich branch network merging with that of Barclays in 2007.
The following is an incomplete list of building societies in the United Kingdom that no longer exist independently, since they either merged with or were taken over by other organisations.[21] They may still have an active presence on the high street (or online) as a trading name or as a distinct brand. This is typically because brands will often build up specific reputations and attract certain clientele, and this can continue to be marketed successfully.
↑ The Temperance Permanent was so-called because the directors were required to sign the pledge, a requirement which was dropped with the merger and name-change – to the reported dismay of some members. [The Times, Friday, 25 April 1975; pg. 4; Issue 59379; col E, 'Temperance abandoned by building society'. Retrieved from InfoTrac on 17 July 2008].
↑ Merger of Skipton Building Society and Scarborough Building Society, 29 November 2008. Archived 10 April 2009 at the Wayback Machine
↑ Chesham Building Society AGM, 31 March 2010. Archived 30 May 2010 at the Wayback Machine , accessed 1 April 2010
Australia
In Australia, building societies evolved along British lines. Following the end of World War II, the terminating model was revived to fund returning servicemen's need for new houses. Hundreds were created with government seed capital, whereby the capital was returned to the government and the terminating societies retained the interest accumulated. Once all the seed funds were loaned, each terminating society could reapply for more seed capital to the point where they could re-lend their own funds and thus became a permanent society.
Terminating loans were still available and used inside the permanent businesses by staff up until the 1980s because their existence was not widely known after the early 1960s. Because of strict regulations on banks, building societies flourished until the deregulation of the Australian financial industry in the 1980s. Eventually many of the smaller building societies disappeared, while some of the largest (such as Advance and St George) attained the status of banks.
More recent conversions have included Heritage Bank which converted from building society to bank in 2011, Hume in 2014, while Wide Bay Building Society became Auswide Bank and IMB followed suit in 2015, and Greater Building Society became Greater Bank in 2016. Building societies converting to banks are no longer required to demutualise.
A particular difference between Australian building societies and those elsewhere, is that Australian building societies are required to incorporate as limited companies.
The Building Societies Act of 1962 allowed for the registration of building societies in Eswatini. For a long time the country only had one building society. A second was registered in late 2019.
Swaziland Building Society: Registered in the 1960s, this is the first and oldest building society in Eswatini. It has branches in almost every town and city within the Kingdom and has been known to be conservative. There have been many rumours of this institution wishing to demutualise to the extent that an amendment to the Building Societies Act was passed in 2019 permitting building societies to demutualise and apply for banking licences.[23]
Status Capital Building Society: Status Capital Building Society was registered as the country's second building society and granted a licence in 2019 by the Financial Services Regulatory Authority after approval and recommendation from the Minister of Finance.[24]
Ireland
The Republic of Ireland had around 40 building societies at the mid-20th century peak.[25] Many of these were very small and, as the Irish commercial banks began to originate residential mortgages, the small building societies ceased to be competitive. Most merged or dissolved or, in the case of First Active plc, converted into conventional banks. The last remaining building societies, EBS Building Society and Irish Nationwide Building Society, demutualised and were transferred or acquired into Bank subsidiaries in 2011 following the effects of the Irish financial crisis.
In Jamaica, three building societies compete with commercial banks and credit unions for most consumer financial services:[27]
Jamaica National Building Society
Victoria Mutual Building Society
Scotia Jamaica Building Society
New Zealand
Regulation
In New Zealand, building societies are registered with the Registrar of Building Societies under the Building Societies Act 1965.[28] Registration as a building society is merely a process of establishing the entity as a corporation. It is largely a formality, and easily achieved, as the capital requirement is minimal (20 members must be issued shares of not less than NZ$1,000 each, for a total minimum foundation share capital of NZ$200,000).[29]
As regards prudential supervision, a divide exists between building societies that operate in New Zealand, on the one hand, and those that (although formally registered in New Zealand) operate offshore:
Building societies that accept deposits from members of the public in New Zealand are regulated as "non-bank deposit takers" under the Non-bank Deposit Takers Act 2013.[30] Such building societies must (unless they qualify for a particular exemption) comply with the prudential regulations. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand monitors compliance with the prudential regulations, but does not prudentially supervise individual building societies for financial soundness. Most such building societies are supervised for compliance with the terms of their debt securities by trustees appointed under securities legislation, and those trustees have various reporting requirements to the Reserve Bank.
Building societies that accept deposits only from offshore customers are not regulated under the Non-bank Deposit Takers Act 2013 or New Zealand's financial markets legislation. Consequently, they are not prudentially monitored by the Reserve Bank or by the Financial Markets Authority. The Reserve Bank cautions on its website that it does not monitor transactions undertaken by New Zealand registered building societies operating in overseas markets.[31] The Department of Internal Affairs is ultimately responsible for all entities that do not expressly fall into other categories for anti money laundering purposes.
Building societies' registration details and filed documents are available in the Register of Building Societies held at the New Zealand Companies Office.
Individual building societies
Over the years, a number of building societies were established.
Some, including Countrywide Building Society and United Building Society, became banks in the 1980s and 1990s. Heartland Building Society (created in 2011 through a merger of Canterbury Building Society, Southern Cross Building Society, and two other financial institutions) became Heartland Bank on 17 December 2012.
Remaining building societies include:
Pacific Eagle Capital (formerly General Equity Building Society)
Heretaunga Building Society
Kiwi Deposit Building Society (in the process of dissolution since 2013)[32]
Southland Building Society, which in October 2008 became a registered bank known as SBS Bank. However, it remains a building society and retains its mutual structure.
Hastings Building Society merged with SBS Bank in October 2010, but with the Hastings Building Society brand continuing to operate as a building society under the name of HBS Bank. In November 2015, HBS Bank brand was discontinued.
Wairarapa Building Society.
Zimbabwe
In Zimbabwe, Central Africa Building Society (CABS) is the leading building society offering a diverse range of financial products and services that include transaction and savings accounts, mobile banking, mortgage loans, money market investments, term deposits and pay-roll loans.
Similar organisations in other countries
In other countries there are mutual organisations similar to building societies:
Austria: In Austria there are four co-operative banks: Allgemeine Bausparkasse (ABV), Raiffeisen-Bausparkasse, Bausparkasse Wüstenrot AG and Bausparkasse der Sparkassen (savings bank).
Germany: In Germany there are 8 Bausparkassen of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe named Landesbausparkassen (LBS) and 12 private Bausparkassen, for example Schwäbisch Hall, Wüstenrot, Deutsche Bank Bauspar AG and so on.
Denmark In Denmark, nearly all home mortgages are done through a Realkreditinstitut who issue low interest rate bonds tied directly to the value of the home. These institutions are historically member-owned, but since the 00's, several has been acquired by commercial banks. These bonds can cover up to 80% of the home's value, and additional loans at higher rates are needed if you need to finance the rest.
Because most building societies were not direct members of the UK clearing system, it was common for them to use a roll number to identify accounts rather than to allocate a six-digit sort-code and eight-digit account number to the BACS standards.
More recently, building societies have tended to obtain sort-code and account number allocations within the clearing system, and hence the use of roll numbers has diminished. When using BACS, one needs to enter roll numbers for the reference field and the building society's generic sort code and account number would be entered in the standard BACS fields.[33]
Halifax is a British banking brand operating as a trading division of Bank of Scotland, itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Lloyds Banking Group.
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.
Nationwide Building Society is the largest retail bank in the United Kingdom, and the world's largest building society, serving over 16 million members. It operates as a British mutual financial institution, meaning it is owned by and run for the benefit of its members. Nationwide is also the seventh largest cooperative financial institution globally. The Society's headquarters are located in Swindon, England.
The Abbey National Building Society was formed in 1944 by the merger of the Abbey Road and the National building societies.
Permanent TSB Group Holdings plc, formerly Irish Life and Permanent plc is a provider of personal financial services in Ireland. Irish Life Assurance plc and the Irish Permanent Building Society merged to form the Irish Life and Permanent Group in 1999 and the merged entity acquired the Trustee Savings Bank in 2001. The group has no connection to the UK's TSB Bank.
A savings and loan association (S&L), or thrift institution, is a financial institution that specializes in accepting savings deposits and making mortgage and other loans. While the terms "S&L" and "thrift" are mainly used in the United States, similar institutions in the United Kingdom, Ireland and some Commonwealth countries include building societies and trustee savings banks. They are often mutually held, meaning that the depositors and borrowers are members with voting rights, and have the ability to direct the financial and managerial goals of the organization like the members of a credit union or the policyholders of a mutual insurance company. While it is possible for an S&L to be a joint-stock company, and even publicly traded, in such instances it is no longer truly a mutual association, and depositors and borrowers no longer have membership rights and managerial control. By law, thrifts can have no more than 20percent of their lending in commercial loans—their focus on mortgage and consumer loans makes them particularly vulnerable to housing downturns such as the deep one the U.S. experienced in 2007.
Bradford & Bingley plc was a British bank with headquarters in the West Yorkshire town of Bingley.
A mutual organization, also mutual society or simply mutual, is an organization based on the principle of mutuality and governed by private law. Unlike a cooperative, members usually do not directly contribute to the capital of the organization, but derive their right to profits and votes through their customer relationship.
Demutualization is the process by which a customer-owned mutual organization (mutual) or co-operative changes legal form to a joint stock company. It is sometimes called stocking or privatization. As part of the demutualization process, members of a mutual usually receive a "windfall" payout, in the form of shares in the successor company, a cash payment, or a mixture of both. Mutualization or mutualisation is the opposite process, wherein a shareholder-owned company is converted into a mutual organization, typically through takeover by an existing mutual organization. Furthermore, re-mutualization depicts the process of aligning or refreshing the interest and objectives of the members of the mutual society.
Banking in Australia is dominated by four major banks: Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, Australia & New Zealand Banking Group and National Australia Bank. There are several smaller banks with a presence throughout the country which includes Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, Suncorp Bank, and a large number of other financial institutions, such as credit unions, building societies and mutual banks, which provide limited banking-type services and are described as authorised deposit-taking institutions (ADIs). Many large foreign banks have a presence, but few have a retail banking presence. The central bank is the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA). The Australian government’s Financial Claims Scheme guarantees deposits up to $250,000 per account-holder per ADI in the event of the ADI failing.
A mutual savings bank is a financial institution chartered by a central or regional government, without capital stock, owned by its members who subscribe to a common fund. From this fund, claims, loans, etc., are paid. Profits after deductions are shared among the members. The institution is intended to provide a safe place for individual members to save and to invest those savings in mortgages, loans, stocks, bonds and other securities and to share in any profits or losses that result.
EBS d.a.c. is a small financial institution in Ireland registered as a designated activity company.
Bristol & West (B&W) was a former mutual building society in the United Kingdom (UK), one of the first to be demutualised to become a publicly traded bank in 1997. Bristol & West had its headquarters in Bristol, England, UK. B&W became a division of the UK arm of the Bank of Ireland in 1997.
The Britannia Building Society was founded as the Leek & Moorlands Building Society in Leek in 1856. It expanded steadily as a regional society until the late 1950s when it began a major expansion drive, partly through branch openings but also some 55 acquisitions. The most substantial of these were the NALGO Building Society in 1960; the Westbourne Park in 1965 ; and the Eastern Counties Building Society in 1974. The Society’s name was changed to the Britannia Building Society the following year.
Cooperative banking is retail and commercial banking organized on a cooperative basis. Cooperative banking institutions take deposits and lend money in most parts of the world.
Kent Reliance is a banking services provider and trading name of OneSavings Bank plc, based in Kent, England. It was founded in 1898 as the Chatham & District Reliance Building Society, changing its name to the Kent Reliance Building Society in 1986 following the merger with the Herne Bay Building Society.
Norwich & Peterborough Building Society (N&P) is a trading name of Yorkshire Building Society based in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Formed by the merger of the Norwich and Peterborough building societies in 1986, at the time of merger with YBS, it was the ninth largest building society in the United Kingdom, with assets in excess of £4.9 billion.
Terminating deposits were a form of savings-and-loan that were one of the key products of the early building society movement in the UK and from there they spread through what is now the Commonwealth. They were banned in the UK around 1910, and are now illegal everywhere, the last vestiges being seen in New Zealand.
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.
Heartland Bank is a New Zealand owned bank that was created in 2011 through the merging of four financial organisations. Heartland was granted its bank registration by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand in 2012. It specialises in motor vehicle loans, reverse mortgages, small business finance, livestock finance, savings, investments and deposits.
↑ Jones, Peter M. (2009). Industrial Enlightenment: Science, technology and culture in Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760–1820. Manchester: Manchester University Press. p.65. ISBN978-0-7190-7770-8.; Chinn, Carl (15 November 2008). "Brum's building society origins". Strabane Mail. Birmingham Post and Mail Ltd. Retrieved 6 September 2010.[permanent dead link]
↑ Rex, Simon (20 April 2010). "The History of Building Societies". Building Societies Association. Archived from the original on 23 August 2013. Retrieved 6 September 2010.; Ashworth, Herbert (1980). The Building Society Story. London: Franey & Co. p.2. ISBN0-900382-38-4.
↑ Peterson, Christopher L. (October 1991). "Truth, Understanding, and High-Cost Consumer Credit: The Historical Context of the Truth in Lending Act". Florida Law Review (55): 839–840.
Llewellyn, D.; Holmes, M. (1991). "In Defence of Mutuality: A Redress to an Emerging Conventional Wisdom". Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics. 62 (3): 327. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8292.1991.tb01490.x.
Rasmusen, E. (1988). "Mutual banks and stock banks". Journal of Law and Economics. 31: 412.
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