Tesco cashes out of the mortgage business

Tesco Bank has left the mortgage market by selling its £3.7bn loan book. Its 23,000 customers will be moved to the Halifax, a subsidiary of Lloyds.

Tesco Bank

(Image credit: DANIEL LEWIS)

Tesco Bank has left the mortgage market by selling its £3.7bn loan book, says The Daily Telegraph. This is in line with a strategy to "slim down the number of services and products it offers to reduce costs". The 23,000 customers will be moved to Halifax, a subsidiary of Lloyds.

While supermarket banking services "were once seen as a credible threat to the dominance of major high-street banks", tighter regulation in the mortgage market and a series of digital-banking apps geared towards winning over younger customers have hampered supermarkets' financial divisions.

The deal is the latest sign of the "convulsions gripping the UK's mortgage market", says Ben Martin in The Times. These have been caused by post-crisis regulations forcing banks to separate legally their investment banking arms from their high-street businesses.

Subscribe to MoneyWeek

Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE

Get 6 issues free
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/mw70aro6gl1676370748.jpg

Sign up to Money Morning

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

Sign up

As a result, the capital that lenders with a global presence would previously have been "free to put to work across their businesses" is now "locked in their domestic divisions". This in turn has encouraged large banks such as HSBC and Barclays to put the money into mortgages, creating "intense competition" that has hit the margins of firms such as Tesco Bank.

Margins in mortgage lending are so low that although the loans were bought at a premium of 2.5%, Lloyds claims that they "would still produce better returns than issuing new loans in current market conditions", says Nicholas Megaw in the Financial Times. It is hardly surprising, then, that Lloyds was not the only bank to bid for them.

Explore More
Dr Matthew Partridge
Shares editor, MoneyWeek

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

Follow Matthew on Twitter: @DrMatthewPartri