Operations
Northern Rock has been one of the top five mortgage lenders in the United Kingdom in terms of gross lending according to Council of Mortgage Lenders statistics.
As well as mortgages, the bank also deals with savings accounts and insurance. Home and contents insurance is dealt with by AXA whilst Legal & General, whose mortgage book Northern Rock took over, arrange life insurance investments.
The bank sold credit cards until 2003, when it sold the business to The Co-operative Bank in order to free capital for its rapid growth in mortgage lending, making a profit of more than £7 million. Northern Rock continued to sell credit cards under its own brand through The Co-operative Bank until November 2007; the decision to stop was made before the 2007 crisis.
In 2006 the bank had moved into sub-prime lending via a deal with Lehman Brothers. Although the mortgages were sold under Northern Rock's brand through intermediaries, the risk was being underwritten by Lehman Brothers.
At the time of being bought by Virgin the bank had 75 branches that have since been re-branded under the Virgin Money name. In 2012 Northern Rock began to provide Virgin-branded savings accounts.
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Famous quotes containing the word operations:
“You can’t have operations without screams. Pain and the knife—they’re inseparable.”
—Jean Scott Rogers. Robert Day. Mr. Blount (Frank Pettingell)
“There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)