Lloyds/HBOS: the shotgun wedding years in the making
Why Daniels’ transformational deal was waiting to happen
That appetite had been lost, quite spectacularly, following Lloyds’ ghastly exposure to Latin American debt in the 1980s. That culminated in a £715 million loss in 1989 (well over £1 billion in today’s money), still regarded as the biggest loss in UK banking history, notwithstanding RBS’s recent efforts to top it. That disaster prompted a renewed focus in the 1990s on good old-fashioned domestic banking under Sir Brian Pitman, which saw Lloyds build up a solid UK empire through its merger with TSB and its acquisitions of the Cheltenham & Gloucester building society and the life insurance and fund management group Scottish Widows.
By the early 2000s, Lloyds TSB’s scope for further local expansion appeared to have hit the buffers.
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