A major new business win. The launch of an exciting new campaign. An important new hiring. Further pontification from the Chairman. A pointless and trivial diary story. If we've put it out in a press release, you'll find it here.
it was arrears at its specialist buy-to-let subsidiary Mortgage Express that blew a hole in Bradford & Bingley, but its problems are rooted in about 20 years of bad decisions that have left it with little room to manoeuvre.
Some of these decisions have been to do with its positioning. For several years, B&B tried unsuccessfully to turn itself into a mass-market brokerage. Giving advice on, and access to, other firms financial services. Ultimately, it has ended up in a similar situation to that of those former mid-sized building societies, Northern Rock and Alliance & Leicester, and it has become clear that its real folly for demutualisation.
The much-vaunted ‘freedom’ resulting from this has turned out to be only the freedom to become the bottom-feeder of the high street, specialising in the deals that its bigger, stronger competitions didn’t want to do.>
That may have been a viable strategy in the ‘nice decade’, but now that things are getting nasty, the risks that were always there are becoming all too visible.
Remedy
- Find a good niche in the market. This may well connect in some way with your building-society heritage.
- Communicate clearly what you stand for.
- Ditch that irritatingly ‘kooky’ girl in the ads. kooky is never good.
- Always remember that the hardest thing in financial services is to engage with consumers. B&B hasn’t engaged with anyone for 20 years, and it is time that this changed.