Alliance & Leicester converted in 1997 from a mutual building society to a public company. Its main activities are the traditional savings and home mortgage businesses, but, with other financial institutions, it is providing a greater range of financial products, such as credit cards, consumer finance and commercial services.

With about 9,000 employees, it has 320 branches throughout Britain.

As a building society, it acquired the state-owned Girobank in 1990, forcing it to sell its leasing and commercial lending business.

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

As a bank it has a reputation for competitiveness, achieving higher net mortgage lending than Abbey, Halifax or Woolwich in 1998. Alliance & Leicester made a pre-tax profit of £455 million sterling (€690 million) in 1998, up by 15 per cent on the £395 million made in 1997. Earnings per share were up 22 per cent, at 54.6p.

Customer account balances were up by 5 per cent, from £18.9 billion to £19.9 billion and gross mortgage lending was up from £2.6 billion to £3.8 billion, representing 4.2 per cent of the market.

Until recently, Alliance & Leicester was trading on less than 15 times forward earnings, making it one of the cheapest British banks.