Their shares were not traded on the stock market but, unlike mutually held building societies, depositors had no voting rights; nor did they have the power to direct the financial and managerial goals of the organisation.

[3] Between 1970 and 1985, the various trustee savings banks in the United Kingdom were amalgamated into a single institution named TSB Group plc, which was floated on the London Stock Exchange.

In July 2012 however, it was announced that the TSB brand would be resurrected by Lloyds Banking Group for the 632 branches it would divest as a separate business.

They sought to create thrifty habits amongst small and medium-sized savers such as craftsmen, domestic servants or the growing proletariat, who were outside the well-to-do market that the commercial banks served.

Their business remained in collecting low-volume deposits, as early attempts at market diversification had been curtailed by the Savings Bank Act 1891.

Each individual trustee savings bank served a separate geographic area, although other organisations competed with them, and this competition grew stronger after 1945.

Such a system had been in operation in Surrey in the south of England for a short time, and it had been proven successful in helping to settle transactions between different savings banks and in improving the service to clients (particularly when on holiday within the UK).

In 1965 a review of retail credit markets led to the trustee savings banks being allowed to issue current accounts (with cheque withdrawals but no overdraft facilities), undertake the payment of utility bills, and safeguard securities and valuables.

[citation needed] Regulatory innovations which allowed the TSBs to diversify their business threatened to erode the deposit base of the clearing banks.

But this potential diversification was limited by the restrictive central control of the Exchequer, the National Debt Commissioners and the Trustee Savings Bank Inspection Committee.

This type of central control had been designed both to guarantee depositors that the savings banks would remain a secure alternative for their deposits and, by standardising general interest rates and regulations, to make it possible for local trustees to work autonomously.

Some other savings banks still worked with leather-bound ledgers, and others used passbooks; either way handwritten record cards piled up in thousands and even the most basic management information and accounting (such as the annual balance sheet) was a huge task to compile, requiring a lot of overtime.

The assets of the Scottish TSBs, traditionally the strongest members of the TSB movement, had been growing more slowly than those in Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Midlands, Wales and the West Country, which had built up enviable reserves and were anxious to protect their territories.

At this critical stage, the Page Committee recommended that the TSBs be freed from government control, allowed to develop their service range, and thus become a third force in banking.

Officials at the Bank of England, with the support of Sir Athelstan Caröe, then chairman of the Trustee Savings Banks Association, called for the establishment of a strong central authority to assume many of the control powers vested in the government, bearing in mind the need to build up adequate capital reserves virtually from scratch.

For the government, there was an advantage in widening the TSBs' investment powers only slowly, not least the threat of competition to its own newly created bank, National Girobank.

[6] The amalgamation of individual TSBs into purposely created regional banks and the establishment of a central board in 1975 provided the resources to support the introduction of personal lending in 1977.

In 1984, the government published a white paper and a new TSB Bill, in which the quasi-federal decentralised structure was abandoned in favour of a single central organisation that no longer had a unique corporate status but was incorporated under the Companies Act 1985.

[17] In 1986, the shares of TSB Group plc were floated on the stock market and the proceeds given to the bank, adding to the ownership equity[18] – a process described by one commentator[who?]