Halifax poised to follow TSB on brands scrapheap – Daily Business

The Halifax name may disappear

Lloyds Banking Group is expected to axe the Halifax brand, raising concerns that more historic names may be destined for the scrapheap.

Scrapping the Halifax brand follows Santander’s intention to abolish the TSB name following its acquisition of the bank last month.

NatWest chair Rick Haythornthwaite told Daily Business earlier this month that the RBS operation in Scotland will be reviewed, without elaborating on what that entailed.

While Lloyds has not confirmed the Halifax story, industry sources say the transition for customers will begin on 1 July, when they will no longer be able to open new Halifax accounts via the brand’s app or website.

By October, Halifax will cease taking on new-to-bank customers entirely, and existing account holders will be gradually migrated to Lloyds Bank in England and Wales.

Lloyds Banking Group has no branches under its own name north of the border where it trades as Bank of Scotland and there is no suggestion that it will be dropped. It also continues to print Bank of Scotland banknotes.

The TSB brand is destined to disappear (pic: DB Media Services)

There is a £200m investment into the Scottish Widows HQ at Port Hamilton in Edinburgh. It will remain the head office for the Lloyds Banking Group’s pensions and investments business with no word of any affect on its brands which include the advice business Lloyds Wealth.

Speaking to The Sun, which broke the Halifax story, a Lloyds Banking spokesperson said the group regularly looks at its brands but said that there are no current changes for customers 

However, sources in the financial advisory market say they are “not surprised” that the 173-year-old Halifax brand could disappear.

As more brands are consolidated into larger groups there has been a degree of customer cannibalisation, with each of them competing against each other. Lloyds Banking Group has 16 brands.

Following the 2001 merger of the demutualised Halifax Building Society and Bank of Scotland to form Edinburgh-based HBOS, the bank became one of the biggest casualties of the financial crash in 2008. It was rescued in 2009 in a taxpayer-payer funded deal with what was then Lloyds TSB.

Lloyds Banking Group has major operations in Scotland but no branches under its own name

The TSB was later hived off, then floated, sold to Banco Sabadell of Spain and last month was acquired by fellow Spanish bank Santander.

Halifax looks like suffering the same fate as TSB. One broker said: “Halifax disappearing from the high street feels like the closing of another chapter in ordinary British life.

“Banks may see this as streamlining, but customers will see it as another familiar name vanishing from towns that have already lost too many branches, too many counters and too much personal service.”

Another broker, Martin Rayner at Compton Financial Services, said that the demise of Halifax was always on the cards.

“It was always clear this was the inevitable direction for banking groups with multiple competing brands under one roof,” he said.

“From a customer perspective, the differences between many of these [Lloyds] brands have become increasingly blurred, while from a business perspective they are often competing for the same customers.

“As banking continues to move away from the high street and towards digital platforms, maintaining multiple overlapping brands becomes harder to justify. Consolidation was always the likely endgame.”

Ken James, director at Contractor Mortgage Services, said: “First came the branch closures and the latest news is simply the next step in the amalgamation of lenders, where competition has narrowed and once‑distinct brands are absorbed into larger corporate structures.

“The same pattern is visible across the sector, with NatWest, Barclays, and others reducing physical presence and consolidating services. This is a sad but not unexpected move from Lloyds Banking Group.”

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