Latest news

The Co-op Bank has new entered 'exclusive' merger talks with Coventry Building Society. This is now officially confirmed.

Starting with the Financial Times, which included a quote from the Customer Union, a number of media outlets have now picked up on the story.

https://www.ft.com/content/cee13985-7dad-4710-b9a2-49f0e9258134 (Paywall)

We commented to the FT:

"The Customer Union for Ethical Banking, the independent union for Co-op’s customers, said a successful deal would “align perfectly with our dual goals: preserving the bank’s world-leading ethical standards and steering it back towards some form of mutual or co-operative ownership.”

28 April 2021

JC Flowers and Bain Capital Credit have agreed to buy BlueMountain Capital’s share in the Co-op Bank. The acquisition remains subject to regulatory approval.

Nick Slape, Chief Executive Officer of the Co-operative Bank, commented:

We asked members of the Customer Union (and Save Our Bank supporters) to send in questions that they'd like us to ask the Co-operative Bank at our regular meeting with them in September 2020.

We assembled - and in some cases amalgamated - a list of questions from members before presenting them to the bank for initial discussion. The bank then went away to consider a more detailed response, and there was a further dialogue. It's taken a while for us to collate the responses and write this up. We'll try and turn this round more quickly in future.

The issues covered are listed below. Click on a subject for details of our question and the bank’s responses.

January 2021

The Co-operative Bank has announced that it has renewed its support for The Hive – a programme delivered by Co-operatives UK to support new co‑operative start-ups, help grow existing co‑ops and help business convert to co-operative or community ownership.

The Hive was launched in 2016, and has already received £1.3 million in funding from the bank. This has helped over 1,000 co-operatives and groups with support including direct business advice, workshops, training and mentoring.

The Co-operative Bank informed us (on Monday 21 December 2020), that the discussions around a potential bid for the bank have ended.

This brings to an end the speculation around a bid, reported by Sky News to be from Cerberus Asset Management, later picked up by The Guardian.

21st November CUEB Gathering – 2:30pm

Introduction

This is a short report from the 5th annual Gathering of the Save Our Bank campaign and Customer Union for Ethical Banking (CUEB). As in the last three years, we were joined by representatives of the Co-operative Bank. We also had 55 attendees at the start of the gathering; a record for any CUEB meeting so far.

Report from Maria Cearns and Lesley McPherson of the Co-operative Bank