Egg Banking

Egg Banking plc

Former type	Subsidiary
Industry	Finance and Insurance
Fate	Assets acquired by Barclays and Yorkshire Building Society
Founded	United Kingdom (1998)
Defunct	2011 (2011)
Headquarters	Derby, England, United Kingdom
Products	Financial Services
Number of employees	1,100
Parent	Citigroup
Website	www.egg.com

Egg is a former British internet bank headquartered in Derby, that is now a trading name of Yorkshire Building Society. Egg was born out of the UK banking arm of Prudential plc, Prudential Banking plc, which was established in 1996, and the Egg brand was launched in 1998.

It was only possible to operate an Egg account over the internet, or via their call centre. Egg specialised in savings and general insurance but no longer offers loans, credit cards or mortgage products.^[1] The credit card business was sold to Barclaycard, followed by the remaining savings and mortgage business to Yorkshire Building Society, which subsequently transferred all remaining customer accounts over from Egg.

Following the sale of its assets, Egg Banking plc, which remained under the ownership of Citigroup, was renamed Canada Square Operations Limited and continues to handle matters relating to certain Egg products from before the sale of assets and any assets that were not transferred to the new owners.^[2]

History

Egg was established as a division of UK life assurance company Prudential. Prudential Banking was involved in direct selling of savings and mortgage products. In 1998, the division was renamed Egg and relaunched as the UK's first Internet bank. The service gained in popularity, and soon the bank had more than 2 million customers. In 2000, Prudential cashed in on its stake and floated 21% of the company on the London Stock Exchange, retaining 79%. In 2003, Prudential announced its intention to sell its remaining stake in Egg to a third party. Despite rumours of interest from the likes of Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC, no formal offers were made public, and Prudential dropped its plans in 2004.

Subsequently Prudential bought back the remaining minority share in January 2006 and de-listed the organisation from the London Stock Exchange. Chief Executive Officer Paul Gratton left the organisation in March 2006 to be replaced by then Chief Operating Officer Mark Nancarrow. Nancarrow was subsequently replaced by Ian Kerr, formerly of HBOS, in November 2006.

On 29 January 2007, Prudential announced that it had agreed to sell Egg to Citigroup for a consideration of £575 million subject to approval by the Financial Services Authority.^[3][4][5] On 1 May 2007, the sale of Egg to Citi was completed and Egg CEO Ian Kerr was appointed head of Egg and Citi UK Consumer.^[6]

In early 2008, Kerr left the business and was replaced in March by Bert Pijls. Pijls joined Citi in 1990 and has held several roles in the bank.^[7]

In November 2007, approximately 350 non-specialist roles were moved from the Dudley centre to Derby resulting in redundancies and relocation packages. The Dudley office has now been closed.

On 1 March 2011, Barclays Bank announced that they had agreed to buy Egg's more than 1 million UK credit card accounts from Citigroup.^[8] Barclay's Barclaycard division took over the Egg credit card business in May 2011 after Citi had spent time trying to sell the business as part of its Citi holdings portfolio. Citi and Barclaycard share the same site at Pride Park but it was announced on 21 June 2011 that Barclaycard would not be required to continue operations in Derby and would move operations to their Kirkby and Northampton sites, leaving 659 people redundant.

On 25 July 2011, Egg announced the proposed sale of all savings and mortgage accounts to Yorkshire Building Society. This would complete Citigroup's sale of the Egg business.^[9]

Advertising

Egg used several advertising agencies to produce its advertising. These included CHI & Partners, Lowe Plus and Mother. Egg Card was launched in the UK with a TV campaign by CHI and press advertisements and direct marketing created by Lowe Plus. Among the press advertisements was one showing a sea of urine samples with a headline that read 'We're just taking 10.9% APR. What's your card taking?' The press campaign was created by Colin Underhay and Alex Pearl who later went on to write the teen novel 'Sleeping with the Blackbirds.'

Egg France

Capitalising on its British success, Egg launched in France in mid-2002 with La Carte Egg. Despite investing heavily in the French market, the services were never popular with the French, who generally hold fewer credit cards than the British. In 2004, Egg decided to close its French operations, selling the unsecured lending business to fr:Banque Accord^[10][11] and the savings and brokerage businesses to ING of the Netherlands.^[12][13]

Controversies

On 2 February 2008, Egg chose to cancel the credit cards of 161,000 (7%) of its customers. The bank gave customers 35 days' notice, after which they would not be able to spend more on their cards.^[14] While publicised as an attempt to purge "risky" customers from their books, many affected customers came forward with claims that they had excellent credit histories. This led to speculation that the move was an attempt to remove customers who did not accumulate interest on their accounts and therefore did not generate profit for the bank.^[15]

The Financial Services Authority fined Egg £721,000 in December 2008 for the persistent misselling of payment protection insurance (PPI) on its credit cards.^[16] The authority's director of enforcement, Margaret Cole, said "Egg used inappropriate sales techniques to try to persuade customers to buy payment protection insurance on their credit card, even when they asserted they did not want the cover."

During 2008, Egg attempted to have one of its customers jailed, saying the chip & pin cards were 'uncloneable', and the customer was 'clearly lying' about transactions from an ATM. The police arrested the customer, but after much investigation, the customer was acquitted.^[17][18]

References

External links

• Official website