UK banks updates
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Britain’s banks and building societies are struggling to cope with a highly competitive mortgage market that threatens to hit profits but benefit homeowners.
For much of the past year, bankers feared that demand in the £1.6tn mortgage market would disappear after the withdrawal of a temporary stamp duty holiday. Instead, they face the opposite problem: demand has proved so robust that more and more lenders want a piece of it.
All the so-called Big Four banks — Lloyds, HSBC, Barclays and NatWest — grew aggressively during the first half of the year, though several executives singled out HSBC, historically the smallest of the four in mortgage lending, for being “back with a vengeance” after a slowdown at the height of the pandemic.
Clifford Abrahams, chief financial officer at Virgin Money, the UK’s sixth-largest bank, said lenders “all piled into” mortgage lending after fears about the economic outlook began to ease.
“Back in January we still had the second…
