Named after a town by the same name in West Yorkshire, Halifax is a British bank that was initially founded as a building society in 1853. Originally known as the Halifax Permanent Benefit Building and Investment Society, the bank became the largest of its kind in the UK by 1913, with its first office in London opening in 1924.

Despite a long period of continued prosperity since its creation, Halifax has undergone a range of transformations and mergers since 1997, initially starting when it became a public limited company. Halifax became a division of the Bank of Scotland in 2001 to form the Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) after a £10.8 billion merger. In a bid to simplify the structure of the HBOS, a new registration act was passed in 2006 and fully implemented in 2007, passing assets over to the Bank of Scotland. Despite this, both companies retained their brand names, even though the Halifax name can’t be used for legal situations. Even more interestingly, in 2006 the Bank of Scotland’s retail bank in the Republic of Ireland announced it would be re-branding simply to Halifax, due to an overwhelming familiarity with the bank through adverts on channels such as ITV.

Another acquisition in January 2009 lead to Lloyds Banking Group taking over the HBOS, wherein it became a subsidiary. The takeover was approved by the Court of Session during a period of uncertainty surrounding falling share prices.

In a move that created a stir, garnering wide-spread media attention, Halifax made a number of changes to the way it managed its current accounts in 2009. Not only did all new accounts have zero credit and debit interest, they introduced a £1 per day fee to all standard current accounts that had gone overdrawn up to the total of £1,999.99. After that, the fee increased to £2 a day up to £2,999.99 and £3 up to £3,999.99. All changes, including alterations to VISA cards, an increased ATM daily withdrawal of up to £500 and the replacement of credit interest with a £5 net monthly payment were introduced in December of 2009, excluding student accounts. These changes led to a few prominent media figures such as Martin Lewis urging customers to keep their accounts in credit and even consider switching to a new bank.

Halifax has had an interesting transformation from a local community focused building society, to a large corporate entity now under Lloyd’s grouping.