Girobank
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Statutory corporation (1968) Public limited company (1988) |
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| Industry | Financial Services |
| Fate | Merger |
| Successor | Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank |
| Founded | 1968 |
| Defunct | 2003 |
| Headquarters | Bootle, Merseyside |
| Products | Postal Giro, Retail Banking |
National Girobank was a British public sector financial institution run by the General Post Office that opened for business in October 1968. It started life as the National Giro but went through several name changes, becoming National Girobank, then Girobank Plc (latterly trading as Alliance & Leicester Giro), before merging into Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank (now part of Santander Corporate Banking) in 2003.
The organisation chalked up notable firsts. It was the first bank designed with computerised operations in mind; the first bank in Europe to adopt OCR (optical character recognition) technology; the first bank to offer interest-bearing current accounts, and the first bank in Europe to offer telephone banking, operating several years prior to the start of Midland Bank's First Direct service. It is widely credited for shaking up the UK banking market, forcing competitors to innovate and respond to the needs of the mass market.
Postal Giro or Postgiro systems have a long history in European financial services. The basic concept is that of a banking system not based on cheques, but rather by direct transfer between accounts. If the accounting office is centralised, then transfers between accounts can happen simultaneously. Money could be paid in or withdrawn from the system at any post office, and later connections to the commercial banking systems were established, often by the convenience of the local bank opening its own account at the Postgiro.
By the middle of the 20th century, most countries in continental Europe had a postal giro service. The world's first post office giro banking system was established in Austria in the late 19th century by the Österreichische Postsparkasse. By the time the British Postgiro was conceived, the Dutch Postgiro was very well established with virtually every adult having a postgiro account with very large and well used postgiro operations in most other countries in Europe and Scandinavia.
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