Demutualised Building Society Survival Hits Rock Bottom

Our webmaster cooperative is just switching from a building society to a cooperative bank because of support for free software and web standards in their online banking – I’ve just given up waiting for it. That’s disappointing, but the building society has given pretty good service over the years and were early accepters of our LLP company type. For comparison, look at this list of building societies which converted to banks late last century, which have been in the news lately:-

1. National and Provincial Building Society was taken over by Abbey National
2. Abbey National was itself taken over by Banco Santander
3. Alliance + Leicester is being bought by Banco Santander
4. Birmingham Midshires was bought by the Halifax
5. Halifax was bought by Bank of Scotland to form HBOS, which is now merging into Lloyds TSB
6. Cheltenham and Gloucester was bought by Lloyds TSB
7. Bristol and West was bought by the Bank of Ireland
8. The Woolwich was bought by Barclays plc
9. Northern Rock, nationalised earlier this year
10. Bradford and Bingley, nationalisation announced today

So that’s it. All gone. 0% survival rate of demutualised building societies. I’ll be amazed if any more convert in future.