About Nationwide Building Society in the UK*

Nationwide Building Society has more that 160 years of expertise and experience of being a building society and looking after the interests of our customers. With customer savings balances of £122.6 billion in the United Kingdom, Nationwide has significant scale in this market.

Nationwide Building Society is owned by its members rather than shareholders. This means that we put our customers’ interests first, rather than having to focus on generating dividends for shareholders.

Our size, strength and mutual status place us in a position to be able to provide a secure and trusted home for your savings. We have always managed our business prudently and will continue to do so.

Nationwide Building Society is a strong and well-funded organisation with a robust and well capitalised balance sheet.

  1. Underlying profit of £276 million, up 30% despite difficult trading conditions, low interest rate environment and margin compression
  2. Impairment charge on loans to customers reduced by 35% to £359 million (2010: £549 million) reflecting our consistent and prudent lending strategy.
  3. High quality assets with Nationwide originated residential mortgage accounts more than three months in arrears of 0.68% (2010: 0.68%) – less than a third of the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) industry average 2.09% (March 2011)
  4. Strong capital ratios maintained through prudent balance sheet management. Core Tier 1 ratio of 12.5%, Tier 1 ratio of 15.7% and total solvency ratio of 19.5% (2010: 12.2%, 15.3% and 19.4% respectively) are amongst the highest in the financial services sector
  5. Positive retail flows reducing our requirement for wholesale funding. With the ratio falling to 25.9% (2010: 27.8%) combined with a continued improvement in wholesale funding profile with 56.6% of balances due in more than one year (2010: 50.3%)

Nationwide Building Society's approach to providing financial services is incredibly straight-forward. We aim to offer a broad range of good value products, while charging as little as possible for day-to-day services.

* Financial data source – Nationwide annual report and accounts 2011