Egg Banking

Egg Banking plc

Former type	Subsidiary
Industry	Finance and Insurance
Fate	Assets acquired by Barclays and Yorkshire Building Society
Founded	United Kingdom (1998)
Defunct	2011 (2011)
Headquarters	Derby, England, United Kingdom
Products	Financial Services
Number of employees	1,100
Parent	Citigroup
Website	www.egg.com

Egg is a former British internet bank headquartered in Derby, that is now a trading name of Yorkshire Building Society. Egg was born out of the UK banking arm of Prudential plc, Prudential Banking plc, which was established in 1996, and the Egg brand was launched in 1998.

It was only possible to operate an Egg account over the internet, or via their call centre. Egg specialised in savings and general insurance but no longer offersloans, credit cards or mortgage products. The credit card business was sold to Barclaycard, followed by the remaining savings and mortgage business to Yorkshire Building Society, which subsequently transferred all remaining customer accounts over from Egg.

Following the sale of its assets, Egg Banking plc, which remained under the ownership of Citigroup, was renamed Canada Square Operations Limited and continues to handle matters relating to certain Egg products from before the sale of assets and any assets that were not transferred to the new owners.

Egg was established as a division of UK life assurance company Prudential. Prudential Banking was involved in direct selling of savings and mortgage products. In 1998 the division was renamed Egg and relaunched as the UK's first Internet bank. The service gained in popularity, and soon the bank had more than 2 million customers. In 2000 Prudential cashed in on its stake and floated 21% of the company on the , retaining 79%. In 2003 Prudential announced its intention to sell its remaining stake in Egg to a third party. Despite rumours of interest from the likes of Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC, no formal offers were made public, and Prudential dropped its plans in 2004.

Subsequently Prudential bought back the remaining minority share in January 2006 and de-listed the organisation from the . Chief Executive Officer Paul Gratton left the organisation in March 2006 to be replaced by then Chief Operating Officer Mark Nancarrow. Mark was subsequently replaced by Ian Kerr, formerly of HBOS, in November 2006.