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 the UK. 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 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, up 15 per cent on 1997 profits of £395 million. Earnings per share rose by 22 per cent to 54.6 pence.

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 a 4.2 per cent share of that market.

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