The Co-operative Bank chat

Near me they’re pretty much next door to each other.

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Which bank have they taken over, please? What business banking facilities were transferred as part of those acquisitions?

Source for that please? They’ve had a license to continue using the Co-op brand while they’ve been owned by hedgefunds, in exchange for doing some ‘ethical’ stuff, why would that have to change now they’re owned by a mutual?

Can’t see how that’s relevant at all.

Cool, did they handle business banking?

Not sure about the others but Nationwide took over several commercial mortgage outfits over the years.

Don’t have the source to hand but it was mentioned several years back that the licence to use the CoOp name was limited. That aside, I can’t see Coventry keeping it.

It was a very long time ago, but I’d have thought that they would have done. They ultimately sold it to Barclays, which presumably is why the DCA had a Barclays sort code.

I’m sure I am missing something but…

What do these have to do with each other?

These are now trading names of Yorkshire Building Society… ?

@Arnie7 I put it to you that you are wildly underestimating the complexity of merging a bank into a building society. The latter, by law, has to capitalise itself far more rigidly and conservatively than a bank does.

I highly doubt The Co-operative Bank will be capitalised such that it can just instantly be mutualised - if they wish to do that they’d have to offload certain books of customers to make the numbers stack up - but doing that would undermine one of Coventry’s stated reasons for investment:

We’ll gain additional customers, mortgage and savings balances, a wider set of products and services, including current accounts and its business proposition, as well as a more nationally representative branch network.

For all sorts of reasons, it may well be pragmatic to retain a separate bank asset, just as Nationwide say they will. What stays where it is in license terms, and what moves in either direction, is anyone’s guess at this stage.

Unlike Nationwide though, Coventry’s usage of the Co-operative brand name is not time limited. The Bank has an agreement with Co-operative’s UK, who have allowed the brand to be used subject to offering certain things, including free banking for mutuals and community organisations.

I fail to see why Co-operative’s UK would now throw their toys out of the pram given the bank is owned by a mutual, which is far closer to the model they exist to support!

That said, I’m not saying its by any means a certainty that the brand remains long term. In many ways I’m surprised it’s stuck around so long.

What I would say is that predictions that this will be ‘the last switch promo before they rebrand to Coventry’ are completely at ends with what Coventry themselves say (my bold):

Coventry Building Society and The Co-operative Bank will continue to operate under their current names and branding while we carry out the work needed to provide a joined-up service. We expect this to take several years.

The only way this prediction would turn out to be correct is if The Co-operative Bank simply stop offering switch incentives for years again, as they did between about 2016-2019.

Note also that they talk of a ‘joined-up service’ - rather loose language which stops short of committing to the two licenses ever being completely combined. I’m expecting both Nationwide and Coventry/Co-op branches to officially offer services for two entities when all is said and done. How this is presented to the customer will be very interesting - LBG of course do this but maintain an entirely separate branch network with helps in explaining the FSCS divide. My instinct is that there would be some very low hanging fruit available if both branch networks could be combined, and yet such a thing has never happened. Maybe when they’ve whittled down the network as far as they wanted to…

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There is a certain amount of speculation at this stage, however Coventry specifically wanted to get back into banking so it seems fairly certain that they will offer a full current account at some stage. As you say, it may be that they would run both brands, at least for a while.

What I don’t see is CoOp doing many more switching offers as that would just complicate any future merger of operations. What I would see is Coventry doing them, possibly with an incentive for current CoOp customers.

Presumably they will want to bring the payment processing in-house too i.e. move it away from HSBC.

Card has just arrived. Apparently I have to phone them to add it to Apple Pay (no other option for verification). Just as well I don’t have anything to do this morning :roll_eyes:

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It’s not a maybe, it’s literally what Coventry BS are saying will happen. They’re the only ones who know the plans.

For anyone else doing the switch bribe… got through to someone who also knew how to set the Visa Secure password. It took about 10 minutes of typing and sending a code to my phone before he could activate Apple Pay. Now getting my 10 debit card payments in and getting the hell out as soon as I get my £75…

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As one of the last few banks I haven’t used that are offering a bonus I was tempted to sign up, after reading all this I’m not sure it’s worth it :laughing:

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They will have to run both brands for a while, what I’m getting at us that I can’t see that they would do so forever, or indeed much more than, say, about five years. Essentially enough time to let them migrate the systems to a common platform.

What happened in practice with the CoOp/Britannia was that as they closed Britannia branches, those staff moved into CoOp branches so you could access Britannia accounts in those branches. A few years later, the Britannia products were moved to similar CoOp products.

It’s impossible to say which direction products would go this time. Coventry has more complexity on the savings front and they also already have (limited) current accounts (but not a full current account app).

It’s by far the most painful one I’ve ever done. I can’t face three more months of spending 45 minutes on hold every time I try to transfer back to my Monzo account so taking the £75 and running!

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It’s not. They’ll fuck up or fuck you over and then make no effort to make things right. Stay well away. Maybe if it was £750 and not £75 but even then I’d think twice.

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Britannia was a far simpler business to consume; they offered consumer savings, mortgages and loans. That’s it. A bank completely consuming a building society is far easier to complete than the inverse because of capitalisation requirements.

Also, they never ever merged the systems together - last year (so only 15 years after the acquisition!) they just moved the remaining customers to an equivalent Co-op Bank product and just shut down the Britannia stuff.

I could see a similar thing happening with Coventry. They’ll choose a platform and everyone will move to that.

If I was betting on it, my bet would be on them upgrading Coventry First (which sort of still exists), adding the functionality to the app and using that rather than the CoOp systems which seem to be stuck in the 1990s.

The capitalisation may be an issue along the way.

Actually, on the capitalisation front, whilst I see the accounts moving to the Coventry platform, they could rejig things financially so that CoOp Ltd as it were was the owner.

No, they couldn’t.

Why not?