We’re changing our name to Leek Building Society

We’ve had different names since we started supporting local people to save and buy homes almost 160 years ago, but you might have noticed we’re making a small change to our name as we drop the word ‘United’ and become known as ‘Leek Building Society’ from 1 October.

Our research found that as our loyal members, you truly value the friendly service we provide, our branch presence across our heartland, and our focus as a mutual organisation on supporting you as well as the local community. But at the same time, a number of existing members, as well as potential new members, felt there was an opportunity to make a subtle change to our name in order to modernise it, while removing any confusion that we’re a football team by dropping the word ‘United’. 

Chief Executive, Andrew Healy, outlined how the name tweak represented a positive response to your member feedback, with our main focus being on continuing to support you and the local community with the same values that had served the test of time.

Andrew said:

“The conclusion from our research was that ‘Leek Building Society’ will give a more modern feel without changing our identity or affecting the important things that members value. As we approach the wonderful milestone of 160 years of service, we’re stronger and more committed than ever to the communities we serve – and we’re investing and appropriately modernising our business to ensure we’re around for another 160 years.”

Elaborating on this, Andrew added: “The pandemic highlighted the importance of digital technology but we remain passionate about the difference people make to our business and to our local community. So as other institutions close the doors of their branches, we’re going against the grain – we’re investing in our branches, refurbishing them and extending our on the ground community support through the services we provide and through our new charitable foundation.

As a mutual building society, we don’t have shareholders, so we can - and do - look at everything from the perspective of how we can best support our members. With the cost of living crisis deepening, this is becomingly increasingly important.

For example, as the Bank of England base rate has continued to rise over the course of this year, we’ve supported members by increasing our savings rates four times while on the other hand, we haven’t passed on the full base rate increases to those mortgage customers on variable rates.

We’re extremely proud of the fact that 95 per cent of our members are satisfied with their experience of our Society but we’re not resting on our laurels. We’ve a clear purpose to make a positive difference to the lives of our local community. And we’re supporting more local charities and community organisations than ever before. A really important part of this is our new charitable foundation which has already donated thousands to several worthy causes in its first few months.”

So while you might see a small difference to our name from the start of October, you can be assured that our identity and values remain unchanged. As one of Leek’s biggest and best employers, we’re still very much ‘united’ with our members and the local community and thankfully, we’re here to stay!