YBS
In recent years , Yorkshire Building Society has undertaken a transformational journey – one that starts and ends with the customer
When Yorkshire Building Society ’ s ( YBS ) Chief Commercial Officer , David Morris , and Director of Business Transformation , Ben Sampson , join me to discuss the seismic change that the mutual has enjoyed over the last five years , there ’ s more than 100 miles between them . Morris is joining from Oxfordshire in the south of England , while Sampson is dialling in from Halifax in the north . It ’ s a sign of the times – in business today , it ’ s not unusual for colleagues to be separated by postal codes , time zones or even oceans . But it ’ s also a mark of how far Yorkshire Building Society has come since it was founded in 1864 .
YBS can trace its roots back more than 150 years to the Huddersfield Equitable Permanent Benefit Building Society , whose members would meet each morning from 5-8am – not on Zoom , but in a single room in the Yorkshire town . Early directors of the society included a dentist , a shoemaker and a plumber . At the end of the first year , there were just six borrowers and assets of around £ 4,000 – over £ 400,000 in today ’ s money .
The name itself stems from the West Yorkshire Building Society , which was founded two years later in Dewsbury – a short six-mile hop from the town of Huddersfield . For over 100 years , the two building societies operated in separate orbits – orbits that would rarely stray outside this small , 10-mile patch of northern England . In 1982 , the West Yorkshire Building Society
156 February 2023