4.3 Meet the lenders
In this section, you will meet the lenders and their debt products, use the financial planning model to guide your borrowing decisions for those ‘big ticket’ purchases and find out the best tips for making sure that the pitfalls of borrowing are side-stepped.
Here Jonquil Lowe, personal finance expert at The Open University, presents a tour of the lending industry in the UK.
Transcript
Although the global financial crisis, which began in 2007, wrought havoc with the UK financial services industry, the sector has continued to be dominated by banks. This domination had been reinforced by the conversion of most of the large building societies to banks in the 1980s and 1990s – although all those that did convert were subsequently either acquired by other banks or, in the case of Northern Rock Bank and parts of Bradford & Bingley Bank, taken into public ownership during the financial crisis.