Alliance & Leicester converted from a mutually-owned building society to a public company in 1997. Its main activities are in the traditional savings and home mortgages sectors of the financial services industry. It also provides a range of other financial products including credit cards, consumer finance and commercial services. It employs 9,000 people with some 320 branches throughout Britain.

In 1996, it entered an alliance with Scottish Amicable and created its own life assurance and unit trust subsidiaries. It subsequently entered leasing when it acquired Sovereign Finance.

As a bank it has earned a reputation for being highly competitive, achieving higher net mortgage lending than Abbey National, Halifax or the Woolwich last year.

Alliance & Leicester made a pre-tax profit of £455 million sterling (€690 million) in 1998. Earnings per share rose to 54.6 pence. Until recently it was trading on less than 16 times forward earnings, making it one of the cheapest British banks.