A mortgage from Tesco?

摘要

Mortgage banks may be falling like ninepins, but that does not matter to Tesco, Britain's leading supermarket chain. "Mortgages are looking quite attractive as a line of business," said an official this week, as the firm reported buoyant half-year profits to August 23rd. Later this month Tesco expects to take full ownership of Tesco Personal Finance (tpf), its 11-year-old joint venture with rbs, a retail bank, and has big plans for it. tpf now has around 5.6m customer accounts with deposits, savings, loans and credit cards. It made a relatively modest ￡71m profit over the past six months, but wants to increase that, along with profits from other services including telecommunications, to ￡1 billion a year.