Banking
Britain has a highly consolidated banking sector, and has for a long time. The original consolidation happened from about 1880 to 1920 and left the sector with five big players; the original big five and a number of medium sized banks.
- Barclays
- Lloyds
- Midland
- National Provincial
- Westminster
In the early 1970s National Provincial and Westminster merged to form National Westminster which later changed its name to NatWest leaving the big four.
- Barclays
- Lloyds
- Midland
- NatWest
With the demutualisation of most of the big building societies as medium sized banks and a series of subsequent mergers and takeovers led to a new big five by 2001
- Barclays
- HBOS (Halifax Bank of Scotland) Formed by a merger of two of the biggest medium sized banks Halifax, a former building society and the Bank of Scotland
- HSBC (Hong Kong Shanghai Bank) took over Midland
- Lloyds TSB (Lloyds merged with the medium sized TSB (Trustee Savings Bank)
- RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) the medium sized Royal Bank of Scotland took over NatWest
With the credit crunch this dropped to four - Barclays
- HSBC
- Lloyds Banking Group Lloyds TSB took over the troubled HBOS after the takeover was 43% nationalised as HBOS turned out to be in much worse condition than expected
- RBS got into serious trouble and was 84% nationalised
The crisis also saw several medium sized banks get into difficulty and Banco Santander acquire three medium sized banks which it intends to merge, this will lead to a new big five - Barclays
- Banco Santander merger of three former building societies Abby (formally Abby National), Alliance & Leicester and the retail and deposit operations of the failed Bradford & Bingley
- HSBC
- Lloyds Banking Group
- RBS
The final fate of Northern Rock another medium sized ex building society remains unclear.
There are a two other big banks or bank like organisations left that aren't part of the big five but are of a similar size and covered by state guarantees due to clearly being too systemically important to fail. So you could argue that there is actually a big seven. - Nationwide the last big building society, substantially bigger than all the rest put together and comparable in size to the big five
- Standard Chartered a UK listed bank doing almost all of its business in Asia and Africa, actually has a market capitalisation bigger than Barclays despite this it has virtually no public profile
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