Banking

What exactly are dormant and lost accounts? Are they different or just similar terms for the same thing? Is there a difference in the way banks and governments define them? Also, and perhaps most...

There was a time when endowments were all the rage. Essentially, the idea was that you'd have an interest-only mortgage, then take out an endowment to not only pay off the mortgage itself, but...

The process known as demutualisation has been very helpful to a number of companies who wanted to grow. Essentially it changes the ownership of a company, shifting from being owned by members to...

Nationwide Building Society is Britain’s second largest mortgage lenders, and highly thought of, to the extent that their figures largely track house prices and sales. It’s one of the giants in...

Halifax, of course, is one of the country's biggest financial institutions these days, a huge provider of mortgages as well as savings - and possibly equally well known for its ads! But it wasn't...

Some reports have as much as £15 billion sitting in dormant bank accounts, and that’s a lot of money waiting to be claimed. A bank account becomes dormant after a year if there haven’t been any...

At one time or another many of us might have opened building society accounts with an eye towards a future mortgage - that's especially true of a slightly older generation. But as time and the...

Safe deposit boxes are really part of a safe custody service offered by some banks. Under this, customers pay an annual fee to a bank in order to be able to store a box of valuables safely in the...

A windfall is what happens when a building society or insurer demutualises. That means that instead of being owned by the members of policyholders, the company issues stocks and is floated on the...