British bank Alliance and Leicester is to be bought by Santander according to an announcement stating an agreement had been reached between the two parties.
The purchase price is understood to be GBP1.26 billion, the transaction to be made in shares. Santander will give one of their shares for every three Alliance and Leicester ones, giving the shares a value of 299 pence each which is around 33 percent higher than the share value at the close of business last week.
Interestingly, although the Alliance and Leicester as well as many other UK and international banks have suffered on the back of the credit crunch Santander have had a very good year. They have seen good returns from Latin America it appears and this has enabled them to look at acquisitions such as this one.
Although the credit crunch has impacted on the performance of financial organisations across the country Lloyds TSB feel they are still on course to achieve their objectives for the year.
The well known high street operator Lloyds TSB saw their results down by almost GBP390 million because of the credit crunch but still saw a Q1 pre-tax profit that was up by over 10 percent. This is a great achievement for the organisation though some observers will wonder how much customers are paying over the odds to help them achieve such results.
A representative from Lloyds TSBexplained that they operated in a prudent fashion and so were not over exposed in the American sub prime mortgage collapse like many others.
Research carried out by the Abbey National has shown that around 20 percent of UK consumers have all their finances dealt with by just one provider. They feel it is simpler this way.
On top of these people who have already gone to one supplier there is another 18 percent who are seriously thinking about it. Between these two groups that is almost 40 percent of people looking to make their finances easier to manage. Does this say something about the population as a whole or the finance companies themselves wonder Abbey National?
On average we have 3 different finance organisations we deal with, as well as three passwords and three PIN numbers. No wonder people want to simplify things. The Abbey National do not advocate using just one password or PIN number though since this has a detrimental effect in security.
