Kent Reliance Building Society
Kent Reliance Banking service, also known as KRBS, was a building society based in Kent, England. Incorporating the Chatham Reliance (established 1898), Dover District (established 1861), Herne Bay (established 1888) and Kent & Canterbury (established 1847), KRBS was the fastest growing building society in the UK between 2003 and 2008 and was a member of the Building Societies Association.
The dramatic growth of KRBS was driven in part by the establishment in 2002 of a wholly owned subsidiary, Jersey Home Loans Ltd, to buy the Jersey mortgage business of Standard Chartered Grindlays Bank Ltd. By September 2008, this subsidiary had mortgages on its books of over £700 million, achieved by competing on both price and service in a market dominated by the major high street banks. Lending was suspended pending a review of Jersey operations as a result of the Jersey bank regulator's ongoing refusal to grant a deposit taking licence as KRBS is not in the top 500 world banks. KRBS also operates a lending business in Guernsey and the Channel Islands operations in aggregate constitute 43% of the Group's mortgage assets.
It had assets of over £2.3 billion, a network of six agencies and two remaining branches (in Chatham and Hempstead, near Gillingham), all in Kent, following a wholesale programme under chief executive, Mike Lazenby, of converting branches to agencies. This saw the number of outlets reduce from 14 to 8. Lazenby described branches as "a liability".
KRBS was also notable as the only member of the UK building society sector to have offshored administrative work to India, via its wholly owned subsidiaries, Easiprocess and EasiOption. The KRBS Group employed significantly more staff in India than it did in the UK, as a result KRBS had the lowest costs (as a percentage of assets) of any UK building society.
Read more about Kent Reliance Building Society: Transfer To OneSavings, Sponsorship
Famous quotes containing the words building society, kent, reliance, building and/or society:
“A publisher is a specialised form of bank or building society, catering for customers who cannot cope with life and are therefore forced to write about it.”
—Colin Haycraft (b. 1929)
“Main Street was never the same. I read Gide and tried to
translate Proust. Now nothing is real except French wine.
For absurdity is reality, my loneliness unreal, my mind tired.
And I shall die an old Parisian.”
—Conrad Kent Rivers (1933–1968)
“Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark:M”I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.””
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”
—Robertson Davies (b. 1913)
“Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark:M”I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.””
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)