An alliance between the Alliance Building Society and the Leicester Building Society on the 1stof October 1985 resulted in the formation of the Alliance & Leicester, which later went on to morph into a bank. The company will assume a new identity with a rename as it has now become part of one of the largest banking groups in the world, namely the Santander Group.
Alliance & Leicester History
Alliance &Leicester achieved several milestones on its journey to the present day. Notable among them were the purchase of Girobank, which it bought from the Post Office in 1990 and its decision to get listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1997, which enabled its members to receive a windfall to the tune of 5000 pounds each in the form of payments. A takeover bid by Santander, a Spanish group armed with 90 million customers and 170,000 employees, was approved by its members in 2008, and Alliance and Leicester is on the verge of being absorbed, name and all into the new group with two other banking services providers Bradford and Bingley, and Abbey. The new name of all these banks will now be Santander from the year 2010 onwards.
Alliance and Leicester Banking Services
Currently, Alliance and Leicester offers its customers a plethora of services that include banking, mortgages, insurance and investments. Its banking services offer personal banking services that include current accounts, personal and secured loans, mortgages, savings, insurance and credit cards.
Alliance and Leicester also offer business banking services that include free business banking accounts, business deposit accounts, finance, lending, insurance, international money transfers, and business advice. The company also offers offshore banking services in the form of other currency accounts, bonds, savings accounts, and other specialist accounts through their International Banking Division.
Alliance & Leicester also offered credit cards to their customers until they were taken over by Santander. The operations were taken over by Santander Cards Ltd., which started issuing their own credit cards under the brand name Santander. Santander was ranked among the top 3 profit-making banks of the world in 2008, and with the takeover of these 3 banking services companies, Santander will now be able to collectively offer 1,300 banking branches and around 4,500 cash machines to its combined customers in the last quarter of 2010, which number around 25 million. Santander itself has around 90 million customers and 1.8 million shareholders in the UK from among the 3 million shareholders worldwide.
The £100 per new account offer that was launched by Alliance and Leicester until the middle of December-2009 saw an overwhelming response from new customers, and reinforced the award of “Current Account Provider of the Year” that had been bestowed upon the bank by the public.
With the support and backing of the Santander Group, the Alliance and Leicester is certain to offer many such offers to tempt other potential customers into its widened fold. By aligning itself with one of the strongest banks in the world, the future of Alliance and Leicester seems to be bright even as UK emerges slowly out of the recession. The expertise and experience of both Alliance and Leicester and Santander will make the bank a force to reckon with even as the recharged group tries to position itself as the number one bank in the world.
- Alliance & Leicester Credit Cards
- Alliance & Leicester Insurance
- Alliance & Leicester Mortgages
- Alliance & Leicester Personal Loans