General Information
Profile & Strategy
Profile & Strategy
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Alliance & Leicester is one of the UK's major financial services groups. It offers a broad range of financial services to personal and commercial customers. This section of the site provides the following information:
Retail Banking covers the broad range of services to personal customers, focusing on the provision of mortgages, retail savings, current accounts and personal loans. To provide the full range of personal financial services products, we have a number of partnerships with market leading suppliers. We provide Legal & General life assurance and long term investment products and have a partnership with MBNA for the provision of credit cards. We also provide insurance products which are mainly provided by Zurich.
Commercial Banking provides services for our commercial customers and is focused on four core product lines. Our commercial lending operation provides finance for both new and existing business customers. We have significant expertise in a number of commercial lending sectors, which has enabled us to grow a diversified lending book. Business banking provides services for medium and small businesses including telephone and internet banking, as well as access to around 14,000 post offices and a growing number of business banking centres across the UK. Our cash business provides cash handling for retailers and other corporates and cash sales to the Post Office and to other financial institutions. The fourth product line is Treasury, which manages the Group's liquidity, funding and hedging requirements.
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| Ratings | Moody’s | S&P | Fitch |
| Long Term | A1 | A | A+ |
| Short term | P-1 | A-1 | F1 |
| Outlook | Negative | Watch Positive | Rating Watch Positive |
To read the reports from the Credit ratings agencies click the appropriate link below:
Standard and Poor's update - 14 July 2008 (32k)
Moody's update - 14 July 2008 (53k)
Fitch update 14 July 2008 (18k)
Our business strategy is focused on delivering increased shareholder value.
Our strategy is built around the delivery of our 4 core brand values over our customers' lifetime with us:
Alliance & Leicester's business policies are well-aligned with the UK Government's regulatory agenda. We are a responsible lender, placing great emphasis on ensuring that customers are not borrowing more than they can afford to repay now or in the future should interest rates rise. We are also a fair bank, giving both new and existing customers access to good value products as well as having robust policy and processes to prevent money laundering.
The other key concept within our strategy is the business model we have adopted for Retail Banking. We are building the UK's leading direct bank - focusing on direct banking - the internet, telephone and ATMs - but supported by a compact UK-wide, branch network. The ways in which UK customers research, buy and transact their financial products is in the midst of a revolutionary change. Customers are using direct channels - and the internet in particular - more and more. Compared with other full-service banks, we already have a high proportion of our sales through direct channels and our own research is showing that direct banking is growing in importance. But it is also clear that customers do like branches to exist - less and less for regular transaction usage, but increasingly for more complex sales and to resolve more complex issues.
Full details on our business strategy are set out in our Annual Report & Accounts.
As a UK-based bank, focused on serving UK customers, we believe our customers prefer to have their calls answered in the UK and will support a bank that is supporting UK call centres. Our staff provide good, friendly service to our customers and we will not put this, or our customer relationships, at risk by outsourcing our core call centres outside the British Isles.