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THE LLOYDS MONEY MACHINE.

Globalisation is sweeping the world of finance. Ignoring that trend hasturned an also-ran into the world’s biggest bank - Lloyds TSB. In Britain, Lloyds Bank is a familiar face on the high street. Elsewhere, it is all but un­known to the general public. But its empha­sis on serving retail customers with extraor­dinary efficiency -along with its firm refusal to follow the financial industry’s drive for international diversification—has turned it into a money machine.

Measured by assets, Lloyds tsb is only the fourth-largest banking company in Brit­ain and 33^rd in the world. Take market value as the yardstick, however, and a dif­ferent story emerges. With a stockmarket capitalisation of £42.1 billion ($68.7 billion), LloydsTSB has become the world’s most valuable bank. Its shares are changing hands at seven times book value, twice as much as its British competitors command. A £l,000 investment in Lloyds shares five years ago would now be worth nearly £4,000.

Not long ago, such giddy numbers seemed a pipedream. In the mid-1980s, Lloyds Bank almost went bust in the back­wash from Latin America’s debt crisis. The bank had to write off £2.6 billion of dud loans, and its claim to be “a thoroughbred among banks” (its logo is a black horse) met with sniggers. Other British banks that had been hurt in Latin America went cap-in-­hand to their shareholders, who patiently gave them new money. Lloyds was in far worse shape, and its shareholders were dis­inclined to buy a rights issue. Brian Pitman, who became chief executive in 1983, de­cided that the best way to advance was to retreat. He jettisoned loss-making foreign subsidiaries, wound down investment banking and international lending, and concentrated on the bank’s bread-and-but­ter business: selling financial services to British consumers.

This flew in the face of banking ortho­doxy, which confused size with strength. Mr Pitman, who became Sir Brian in 1994, insisted that increasing the share price was more important than expanding the balance sheet. The bank’s”declared aim is to dou­ble the share price every three years. This is not just hot air: it has met this goal consistently for the past 15 years. «He was the first to realise that planting flags around the world was not always the best way to make money», says Fred Crawley, a former Lloyds executive.

Spot the trend

The attention to shareholders has been accompanied by a knack for sensing the di­rection in which banking was moving. Lloyds was the first big British bank to buy a life assurer, Abbey Life; the first to offer mortgages and to bid for a building society, Cheltenham & Gloucester; the first to close much of its branch network; and the first to bid (unsuccessfully) for another clearing bank, Midland, sparking much-needed banking consolidation in Britain.

The £ 1.8 billion purchase of Cheltenham & Gloucester in 1994 gave Lloyds a valuable brand through which to push its own mortgage business, which had been flagging. Lloyds now issues 16% of new mortgage loans in Britain. In 1995 Sir Brian went after tsb, an institution whose strategy was so obscure that wags had dubbed it “That Sorry Bank”. But  TSB could help plug gaps—it had lots of branches in Scotland, where Lloyds had few—and of­fered plenty of scope to cut costs by elimi­nating overlaps. Not all the savings have come from tsb. Lloyds discovered that some of tsb’s businesses were better than its own. The telephone bank, which has 800,000 customers, is run by managers from tsb.

These acquisitions have given Lloyds tsb a retail-banking breadth that no other British bank can match. It is the market leader in cheque-writing accounts and per­sonal loans, and the second-largest credit-card issuer. It pumps Lloyds, tsb and c&g products to 15m customers through a net­work of 2,700 branches, hundreds more than its nearest rival, NatWest.

Lloyds TSB, however, cannot trace its blessings to good management alone. Brit­ain has offered an ideal banking environ­ment in the mid-1990s: the economy has been buoyant, creating heavy demand for loans; long-term interest rates have dropped significantly, increasing the value of banks’ bond and loan portfolios; and rapid employment growth has reduced loan default rates. Under these conditions, the bank’s heavy exposure to Britain is a plus. But if the British economy sputters, ri­vals like to suggest, Lloyds TSB will sputter with it, far more than its more diversified competitors.

The stockmarket seems to think this an unlikely prospect. But it is clearly the big­gest risk in Sir Brian’s strategy. The bank has sought to reduce its vulnerability to eco­nomic swings by broadening its consumer-related business. A fifth of its profit now comes from insurance, primarily life insur­ance, which moves in a different cycle from consumer banking.

In trying to broaden its business, how­ever, Lloyds  TSB runs head-on into a prob­lem that most other banks would envy: it simply earns too much money. It would gladly use this for acquisitions. But short of buying an­other big British bank and closing down hundreds of branches, which would almost certainly be blocked on competition grounds, it is difficult to imagine an acqui­sition that would be as profitable as Lloyds  TSB’S current business. The bank is consid­ering a share buy-back as a way of returning that extra cash to shareholders.

The alternative lies in finding a second “home” market where Lloyds could work its magic. With a single currency looming, continental Europe has attractions. But few banks have a culture similar to Lloyds TSB’s - and few countries would allow the redundancies that would be necessary to meet stringent profit targets.

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