Shuffle and deal
THE safest bet of all is that more building societies will follow the Abbey (you have remembered, I trust, that money in the front-runners, the National & Provincial or the Alliance & Leicester, may qualify you for free shares?) and that the deals will come next. Teams of merchant bankers are already roving the country, trying to stitch up deals in which life assurance companies would take building societies over as tied outlets for the sale of policies. Rival teams are prospecting on behalf of the big Con- tinental banks. The Alliance & Leicester, for its part, is already trying to buy a bank. Its agreed price for Girobank is said to leave change out of £100 million. I hope that the new owners will break the restric- tive tie which prevents sub-postmasters from opening their Giro counters outside official Post Office hours. The biggest branch network of all, open at night or on Sundays or for as long as the shopkeeper chooses — that really would be competi- tion.
Previous page
