Tesco finance unit shuns Lloyds and RBS assets
Tesco is not interested in any assets bailed-out banks Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland will be forced to sell to satisfy EU antitrust worries, the head of Tesco Personal Finance said.
Benny Higgins also said on the sidelines of the Euro Finance Week conference yesterday that Tesco might not launch a current account until well into 2011, later than some analysts had expected.
“We don’t need a branch network. We already have a very large physical presence,” Higgins said. “The thing that we don’t have, that we are building, is infrastructure, but the problem is people that are selling things aren’t selling infrastructure.”
Tesco Personal Finance is building up its own infrastructure to “stand on our own two feet” and is close to finalising a deal with an IT supplier for the banking platform, Higgins added.
Lloyds and RBS agreed to sell a string of assets including RBS’s insurance unit and more than 900 branches between them over four years as part of a deal struck earlier this month that was aimed at appeasing British authorities and EU competition regulators.
Higgins said there was no final decision yet on when to launch a current account or get into mortgages.