We are committed to remaining a building society because we believe this is in the best long-term interests of our current and future members. Our core business is providing personal financial services including residential mortgage lending (substantially funded through retail savings), general retail banking services, personal investment products, insurance, personal lending and offshore deposit-taking. We also engage in commercial lending and treasury operations to generate additional value for our members.
Our primary business objectives are:
- to maximise value for our members over the long term, in terms of pricing benefit and retained profits, and
- to provide our members with a range of top quality, competitive financial services that are widely available and delivered with speed, courtesy and reliability, backed by policies of fairness, honesty, employee importance and corporate responsibility
Our strategy for achieving these objectives consists of:
- concentrating primarily on personal financial services and avoiding diversification or acquisition of other businesses in areas where we are unable to apply our expertise or extract sufficient value for our members
- increasing overall value generated through a combination of targeted quality growth, improved efficiency and sensible margin management
- preserving our financial strength by retaining adequate profit to meet regulatory requirements, support future growth and retain the confidence of members and markets
- distributing our mutuality dividend fairly across all members through all of our product ranges, reinforcing loyalty and increasing product cross holdings developing and effectively using new technologies to sell and administer new and traditional products in new ways, increasing efficiency and expanding services
Our goal is to increase our overall market shares of the UK retail savings and residential mortgages markets. We intend to manage our growth targets prudently to avoid putting asset quality and capital strength at risk. We believe our other personal financial services businesses, comprising insurance, personal lending and personal investment products, offer strong growth opportunities, and we will increase product cross-holdings to meet more of our members' financial needs. We plan to increase our commercial loan portfolios and treasury operations, subject to quality and contributions constraints. We aim to fund our retail lending operations primarily through retail savings. To achieve this, we will manage our retail interest margin.
