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Lloyds Bank
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Lloyds Bank Plc was a British commercial bank which operated in England and Wales (and to a much lesser extent Scotland) from 1765 until its merger into Lloyds TSB in 1995. It expanded during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and took over a number of smaller banking companies. In 2009, following the acquisition of HBOS, Lloyds TSB Group was renamed Lloyds Banking Group.
origins of Lloyds Bank date from 1765, when button maker, John Taylor and iron producer and dealer, Sampson Lloyd II set up a private banking business in Dale End, Birmingham.
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Encyclopedia
Lloyds Bank Plc was a British commercial bank which operated in England and Wales (and to a much lesser extent Scotland) from 1765 until its merger into Lloyds TSB in 1995. It expanded during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and took over a number of smaller banking companies. In 2009, following the acquisition of HBOS, Lloyds TSB Group was renamed Lloyds Banking Group.
History
The origins of Lloyds Bank date from 1765, when button maker, John Taylor and iron producer and dealer, Sampson Lloyd II set up a private banking business in Dale End, Birmingham. The first branch office opened in Oldbury, some six miles (10 km) west of Birmingham, in 1864. The symbol adopted by Taylors and Lloyds was the beehive, representing industry and hard work. The black horse device dates from 1677 when Humphrey Stokes adopted it as sign for his shop. Stokes was a goldsmith and "keeper of the running cashes," an early term for banker. When the bank took over the site in 1884, it retained the black horse as its symbol. This private bank converted into a joint-stock company known as Lloyds Banking Company Ltd. in 1865, becoming Lloyds, Barnetts and Bosenquets Bank Ltd. in 1884 and finally Lloyds Bank Limited in 1889.
In 1968 a failed attempt at merger with Barclays Bank and Martins Bank was deemed to be against the public interest by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. Barclays finally acquired Martins the following year. In 1972, Lloyds Bank was a founder member of the Joint Credit Card Company (with National Westminster Bank, Midland Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland) which launched the Access credit card (now MasterCard) and in the same year it introduced Cashpoint, the first online cash machine to use plastic cards with a magnetic stripe.
National Bank of New Zealand
Two sons of the original partners followed in their footsteps by establishing a bank—Barnetts, Hoares, Hanbury and Lloyd—in Lombard Street, London. Eventually, this became absorbed into the original Lloyds Banking Company. In 1872, the National Bank of New Zealand was founded in London as an overseas bank and shared many directors with Lloyds Bank. In 1919, Lloyds Bank acquired a small interest in the National Bank and in 1966, purchased it outright. In 1978, the National Bank moved its head office from London to Wellington.
Through a series of mergers, including the Wilts. and Dorset Bank in 1914 and the Capital and Counties Bank in 1918, Lloyds emerged to become one of the big four clearing banks in the United Kingdom. By 1923, Lloyds Bank had made some 50 takeovers, one of which was the last private firm to issue its own banknotes—Fox, Fowler and Company of Wellington, Somerset. Today, the Bank of England has a monopoly of banknote issue in England and Wales. 1911 saw the formation of Lloyds Bank (France) when Lloyds Bank acquired Armstrong and Co., based in Paris and Le Havre. From 1917 it was run jointly as Lloyds and National Provincial Bank. In 1955, Lloyds Bank bought full ownership and it became Lloyds Bank (Foreign) and later Lloyds Bank Europe.
Bank of London and South America
A strong connection with South America began in 1918 with the acquisition of the London and River Plate Bank. The later merger with the London and Brazilian Bank resulted in the Bank of London and South America. In 1971, Lloyds Bank bought the controlling interest in BOLSA and merged it with Lloyds Bank Europe to form Lloyds and Bolsa International Bank. This became Lloyds Bank International in 1974 and was merged into Lloyds Bank in 1986.
Lloyds Bank of Canada was formed in 1986, when the bank purchased the Continental Bank of Canada. In 1990, after several years of losses, Lloyds Bank sold its Canadian operations to the Hongkong Bank of Canada, a subsidiary of HSBC Holdings Plc. In 1988, the Bank merged five of its businesses with the Abbey Life Insurance Company to create Lloyds Abbey Life. By the early 1990s, Lloyds Bank had offices in 30 countries, from Argentina to the United States of America. An already commanding presence as the National Bank of New Zealand was further strengthened in 1994 by the takeover of the Rural Bank, the former New Zealand government owned bank, from Fletcher Challenge, making it the leading provider of agricultural finance in the former colony.
Trustee Savings Bank
In 1995, the demutualised Cheltenham and Gloucester Building Society joined the Lloyds Bank Group, giving it a large stake in the UK mortgage lending market. Later the same year, Lloyds Bank announced its merger with the Trustee Savings Bank (TSB Group) to form Lloyds TSB Group Plc, at that point the largest bank in the UK by market share and the second-largest to Midland (now HSBC) Bank by market capitalisation. The TSB's had been founded by the Revd. Henry Duncan of Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire in 1810, but only incorporated under the Companies Act in 1985. Lloyds' three Scottish branches were absorbed into TSB Scotland, as Lloyds TSB Scotland, a separate subsidiary to Lloyds TSB Bank in England and Wales. TSB Northern Ireland had already been sold to Allied Irish Banks in 1991, becoming First Trust Bank. While First Trust Bank inherited the right of AIB to issue its own banknotes, savings banks never had this right in either Northern Ireland or Scotland. Lloyds Abbey Life became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lloyds TSB Group in 1996 and was closed to new business in 2000.
In March 2009, the British Government became the majority shareholder of Lloyd's Bank
See also
Bibliography
- Sayers, R. S. Lloyds Bank in the History of English Banking Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957
- Winton, J. R. Lloyds Bank 1918–1969 Oxford University Press, 1982
- Jones, Geoffrey Lombard Street on the Riviera: British Clearing Banks and Europe 1900–1960 Business History, Vol. 24 No. 2 (pp. 186-210) July 1982
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