Williams & Glyn's Bank

Williams & Glyn's Bank Limited was established in London in 1970, when the Royal Bank of Scotland merged its two subsidiaries in England and Wales, Williams Deacon's Bank Ltd. and Glyn, Mills & Co. In 1985, Williams & Glyn's was fully absorbed into the Royal Bank of Scotland and ceased to trade separately.

Williams & Glyn later returned as a division of The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and National Westminster Bank (NatWest), consisting of 307 RBS branches in England and Wales and NatWest branches in Scotland. The division was formed because the then RBS Group, owner of the two banks, was required by the European Union (EU) to divest a portion of its business after HM Government took an 84% stake in the group during the 2008 United Kingdom bank rescue package, which the EU classed as state aid. RBS Group was required to divest Williams & Glyn by the end of 2017. The Williams & Glyn unit had approximately 250,000 small business customers, 1,200 medium business customers and 1.8 million personal banking customers.

A consortium including Kuwait Investments, Corsair Capital, Centerbridge Capital and the Church of England invested £600 million into the business in September 2013, in exchange for equity once the bank was floated in an initial public offering (IPO). On 5 August 2016, RBS Group announced it had abandoned plans to spin off Williams & Glyn as a stand-alone business, stating that the new bank could not survive on its own due to Brexit. The group was to sell the unit to another bank as an asset transfer.

In February 2017, HM Treasury and the European Commission reached a provisional agreement in which RBS would be able to retain the Williams & Glyn assets in return for investing £833 million into a fund aimed at increasing small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) lending by challenger banks and for RBS agreeing to allow SME customers of challenger banks to use its branch network for cash and cheque handling. A final agreement for the retention of the Williams & Glyn assets by RBS Group was approved by the European Commission in September 2017. RBS Group announced its intentions to close 162 of the branches that were to have formed Williams & Glyn in April 2018. The closure of a further 54 branches was announced in September 2018.