TSB Bank Is Back But Crashes

TSB Bank Is Back But Crashes.

The merger of Lloyds Bank and the Trustee Savings Bank (TSB) has technically been reversed with the TSB brand reappearing on our high streets are an absence of 18 years.

Lloyds Banking Group was a merger of Lloyds TSB and the ailing Halifax Bank of Scotland during the financial crisis and credit crunch.

The merger of these two huge banks then caused it to need bailing out and taking into part state ownership.

European banking competition law and protecting the financial markets and consumers from another ‘super tanker’ bank crash, ruled that Lloyds Banking Group should be broken, up with over 600 of its high street branches to be sold.

There have been a number of attempts to sell off these branches as a going concern, and famously Co-Op Bank had agreed a deal to buy the branches and then this deal collapsed as the ‘less than solid’ financial credentials of Co-Op Bank came to the fore.

Comment

Operation Verde, as we believe it is named internally within Lloyds Banking Group has been in the planning for many months to separate bank branches and accounts.  Indeed, many clients will just have been told whether they are now Lloyds clients or TSB clients.

As a general rule, we believe the whole switchover has run comparatively quite smoothly although we know that the TSB website crashed on Monday.  To be expected we suppose, given the sheer volume of new user traffic that would be using the website.

Competition is everything and in banking, more banking groups are needed rather than less to create that competition.  Reverse mergers we can see coming for all of the major groups that were merged and subsequently taken into public ownership at the crash.  It is interesting to note that the bank that created the biggest corporate losses in UK history, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is likely to be split with the profitable side of RBS sold and the toxic debt/non-profit side to remain in state ownership.