So I received a £50 gift from Nationwide this week, which is very nice and thank you very much! The gift is to celebrate their taking over of Virgin Money...
Obvs I checked to see if this was a scam, it did seem a bit too good to be true, and no it wasn't, but then again if it was it's a pretty lame scam. I get a text saying I've got £50 and then I check independently on my PC with the bank and I haven't got £50, well so what! (The text didn't have any links).
But anyway, no scam, me and a lot of other customers are now £50 better off, this has cost Nationwide about £650 million.
Generous or not...?
Obvs I also had to look into the context of why we got this.
Nationwide Building Society completed its acquisition of Virgin Money back in October 2024, for £2.9 billion, making it the UK's second-largest mortgage and savings provider.
Nationwide did VERY WELL out of the deal, they had a £2.3 billion accounting profit on the deal because the fair value of Virgin Money's net assets exceeded the price paid.
And performance wise this was a good move: Nationwide's statutory pre-tax profit declined to £568 million for the six months to September 30, 2024, from £989 million previous year. This was partially attributed to saving rates and member rewards, which were competitive in nature.
This is compared to Virgin Money's pre-tax profit of £279 million for the period, up from £109 million previous year, driven by cost savings.
SOURCES:
Final Thoughts...
So this seems like a profitable deal for Nationwide, and they've shared about 20% of the straight-up profit with customers, I mean they in no way had to that and I think 20% is pretty generous TBF.
So happy days!