Abstract:

Competition among banks in the United Kingdom developed very rapidly in the first half of the nineteen-seventies. The introduction of "Competition and Credit Control" in 1971 was a major factor in hastening the destruction of the earlier cartelistic pattern, which legislation and other factors in previous years had started. The opening campaign began in mid-1973 and by the first half of 1974 all the major banks in both England and Wales, and in Scotland, had modified their charging policies for personal current accounts. This paper reviews this extraordinarily rapid change in banking and then describes in detail how Williams & Glyn's Bank - the fifth largest of the London Clearing Banks - approached the problem of its own pricing policy for "chequeing accounts".