Six years is not a particularly lengthy period of time for these things. RBS/Natwest backend merger was around that.
Six years is also the period Nationwide have licensed the Virgin brand for - and we know that the Clydesdale Bank plc entity will continue in some shape or form beyond that.
Both Nationwide and Coventry are setting the expectation at integration taking ‘several years’, and they have good reason to do that.
If you want an example of a really protracted integration period take a look at Britannia BS, which was merged in to Co-op Bank back in 2008 but still had separate accounts and systems until last year!! And that was a simple building society with savings and mortgages.
To be fair, the CoOp had rather a lot of other things on its mind over that period. And, it is the CoOp, so I’d expect it to have tootled along at a fairly sedate pace regardless of other things.
Yes, but it’s the one getting taken over this time. We should run a poll on when we think there will be visible changes. My money is still that something visible will happen in 2025.
So, if CoOp launched a new current account but called it the Coventry account (can’t see that happening, but you never know).
Addition of Coventry to the logo (although if Coventry customers can’t use CoOp branches, that would be confusing).
Or a visible souping up of the Coventry website or app.
Or perhaps a move towards centralising services. For example, a start on moving savings to one office, current accounts to another, credit cards somewhere else.
I think something like those or similarly visible will happen, or at least start to happen, in 2025.
To my mind, the easiest would be for them to start re-enabling features in the Coventry website and app, but there’s issues with that in that it relies on HSBC for current account services and I’d have thought that they’d want to bring it in-house.
Agree, unlikely. Some sort of targeted incentive/switching bonus for Coventry members is slightly more likely (but still not likely).
I think that’s less unlikely actually. In the 90s TSB branches had ‘part of Lloyds TSB Group’ added to their logos before they completely merged and allowed customers to use both sets of branches (albeit still using two separate backends!).
Midland also had ‘HSBC Group’ branding added to their existing logo, and then a proto-HSBC rebrand still keeping the Midland Bank name but with the HSBC logo before fully rebranding as HSBC - again I think the rebrand coincided with the point UK branches could service international customers and vice versa.
And of course Britannia branches had ‘part of Co-operative Bank’ suffixes added to their logo as an interim step; again before you could do anything other than Britannia account stuff in them.
If Coventry intend to keep the Co-op Bank brand longer term, I would say some sort of integrating branding tweak or rebrand would be a sensible early step.
It could happen, but again it’d be tricky to make any conclusions based upon that. It’s only relatively recently that they’ve added an app, for example, but they did so long before they acquired Co-op Bank still!
Categorically will not happen inside a year. Will eat my hat if I’m wrong on that one.
However they dress this up, it’ll end 2025 being two separate operations, each with their own branches, accounts and servicing.
I’m fairly confident that discussions around where functionality should sit will happen quite quickly, and I could see some people being exchanged to learn how the other side works, but I can’t see anything of this being that visible in the short term, so your hat is probably safe
The NR / old Virgin Current accounts were probably not worth the hassle once they looked at the backbook.
They were probably working on the basis they’d wither on vine as a closed (niche) product and any people that did want to stay would do the CASS themselves.
I could see them letting them just die off, but they actually had a plan to move them over, it’s just that they never implemented it (COVID turning up around the time they were intending to implement the plan didn’t help obviously).
Wonder if Nationwide will dust off that plan again? If memory serves, the only thing that sank it was trying to run with it as we were going into lockdown.
