1. The Architectural Association has a good record in providing customers with good interest rates and low fees. Competition is limited to personal banking (people hardly touch their accounts to get the best deal), and they can be regarded as providing answers to conflicts of interest between banks and customers. Many building societies have retained their traditional advantages in mortgage leasing and personal banking. They are often quite weak in corporate banking and similar fields.

2. The building society is actually a kind of mutual aid finance, which is a bank owned by customers. The name reflects the origin there, providing personal mortgage loans, leasing and savings accounts.

3. According to Xinhua News Agency, the Financial Times reported last Saturday that due to the credit crunch, British financial institutions sought more financing channels, and British banks and building societies competed to raise interest rates to attract deposits, from which depositors got more interest income. According to the report, in the increasingly fierce competition for funds, banks such as Northern Rock in the United Kingdom have raised the deposit interest rates of various types of savings accounts, and some small building associations have also issued fixed-rate bonds with an annual interest rate of 6.9%. In addition, as the downward trend of the UK real estate market shows no signs of reversal, the market value of Norich Real Estate Trust and Investment Fund, the largest retail real estate investment fund in the UK, decreased by 7% in June 165438+ 10, and other large real estate investment funds also experienced a sharp decline in market value last month. The decline in the market value of funds has further hit the confidence of investors, making the redemption scale of such funds greatly exceed the inflow of funds in the near future. At present, the credit crunch has led to an increase in the financing cost of the capital market, while the weak trend of the real estate market has led to the inability of the bank mortgage interest rates to increase accordingly. The space on which the mortgage business of British banks depends is constantly being compressed. At present, banks and building societies want to reduce their dependence on the credit market and find cheaper short-term financing, so they turn to retail customers for more funds.