Why is Halifax changing to Lloyds? The end of a 173-year-old brand

Why is Halifax changing to Lloyds? Because Lloyds Banking Group, which has owned both since 2009, has decided to run one consumer brand instead of two. The Halifax name will stop opening new accounts, existing customers will move to the Lloyds app, and branches will be rebranded through 2027. It ends the high street life of a name founded in a Yorkshire mill town in 1853.

What is happening to Halifax customers

The group announced the move at the start of July with a film on Halifax’s own channel, above. Customers keep their sort code and account number, and accounts will be rebranded to Lloyds over time. Jas Singh, who runs consumer relationships for the group, promised customers would keep “everything they know and love today”, as IFA Magazine reported.

Some Halifax branches will close where a Lloyds one already stands nearby, and Halifax mortgages will stop being sold through brokers in 2027. Bank of Scotland is unaffected. The group says no jobs are going as part of the change.

The brand being retired

Halifax began as a building society in Halifax, West Yorkshire, and by 1913 it was the biggest in the country, a position it held until it gave up mutual status and floated in 1997. It merged with Bank of Scotland in 2001 to form HBOS, and came to Lloyds in the rescue of 2009.

In advertising terms it punched well above a bank’s usual weight. From 2000 its campaigns starred its own staff, most famously the Birmingham branch worker Howard Brown, singing rewritten pop songs about current accounts. Few were fond of them at the time, and almost everyone remembers them, which is the definition of a working bank advert.

Why kill a famous name

Running two brands means two marketing budgets, two apps and two sets of everything, to sell near-identical products to overlapping customers. Since early 2025 customers of either could already use any branch in the group, so the distinction had become cosmetic. The spreadsheet case is easy.

The brand case is harder. Halifax stood for something Lloyds does not: friendlier, more northern, more ordinary, and that warmth took 170 years to build. Nationwide has spent the last three years proving there is still money in being the bank that is not a bank.

Lloyds is betting its black horse can absorb those customers without them noticing what they have lost. It is the biggest UK brand retirement in years, and it will be a case study either way, a story we follow in our ranking of the year’s rebrands.