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.
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