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The term ''building society'' first arose in 19th Century Britain from working men's Co-operative savings groups: by pooling savings, members could buy or build their own homes. In the UK today building societies actively compete with Bank s for most "banking services" especially mortgage lending and Deposit accounts. There are currently ( 2006 ) 63 building societies in the UK with total assets exceeding £260 billion[http://www.bsa.org.uk/ Building Societies Association]. ORIGINS The original Building Society was formed in ), and 1960. In their heyday, there were hundreds of building societies: just about every town in the country had a building society named after that town. Over succeeding decades the number of societies has decreased, as various societies merged to form larger ones, often renaming in the process: most of the existing larger building societies are the end result of the mergers of many smaller societies. 1980S In the s after their Demutualisation . A movement arose whereby investors would open a savings account with a Mutual building society, thereby getting voting rights in the society, and pressurise for a vote on Demutualisation , with the intent of getting a windfall payment as a result. A number of societies' members and managers were very unhappy about such investors, who were termed '' Carpetbaggers '', maintaining that as mutual societies, they could supply better and cheaper home loans than the banks and demutualised societies, as they only had to make a profit to cover their operational costs, and had no need to generate an additional profit to return to shareholders. In the end, after a number of large demutualisations, and pressure from carpetbaggers moving from one building society to another to cream off the windfalls, most of the remaining societies modified their rules of membership in the late 1990s. The method usually adopted were membership rules to ensure that anyone newly joining a society would, for the first few years, be unable to get any profit out of a demutualisation. With the chance of a quick profit removed, the demutualisations have slowed considerably, As Of December 2001 . REMAINING BUILDING SOCIETIES The 10 largest of the remaining building societies are listed below. (Total Group assets in Sterling , as of June 2005.) # Nationwide £111,592m # Britannia £23,298m # Portman £15,505m # Yorkshire £15,034m # Coventry £10,500m # Chelsea £8,868m # Skipton £8,137m # Leeds £6,129m (name changed from ''Leeds & Holbeck'' mid-2005) # West Bromwich £5,044m # Derbyshire £4,407m Source: Building Societies Association AUSTRALIA In Australia , building societies evolved along British lines. Because of strict regulations on Bank s, building societies flourished until the deregulation of the Australian financial industry in the 1980s . Eventually many of the smaller building societies disappeared, while some of the largest (such as St. George ) officially attained the status of banks. USA In the United States , the Savings And Loan Association s have a similar organization and purpose. REFERENCES SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS |
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