VIRGIN Money boss Sir Richard Branson has given a strong signal that his Edinburgh-based group won’t emerge as a white knight bidder for the 316 Royal Bank of Scotland branches that are back on the market.
Santander UK was initially expected to pay £1.65 billion for the branches ordered to be offloaded by the European Commission in return for RBS’s £45bn taxpayer bailout.
But two-year negotiations broke down recently when Santander walked away from the deal, said to be because of concerns about IT problems.
Virgin, which earlier this year bought taxpayer-owned Northern Rock, was thought to be a likely alternative bidder as Branson seeks to build up banking scale to take on Britain’s Big Five.
But on a trip to India, the tycoon, whose other business interests currently include Virgin Rail, said Virgin Money was growing fast enough without further acquisitions currently.
“We’ll always look at opportunities, but I would say it’s more unlikely than it is likely that we’d do a transaction like that [the RBS branches],” Branson said.
He said Virgin Money already had one million new accounts since it took over Northern Rock last January for between £747 million and £1bn, depending on targets being met. He also said one in three of all new mortgages was also being written by the group.
Branson added: “So we don’t need to acquire a lot of other branches, we’re building our own new branches, and I’m very happy with the way its growing organically.”
Arguing the opportunity for Virgin Money to carve out a slice of the UK banking market, he said: “A few greedy bankers let the world down big-time and the world is only now coming out of recession as a result.”