Dear Ecology,

Have you ever considered going into MicroFinance like credit unions (or the wonderful Grameen Bank)? That's a different, more grass-roots, form of lending, but more stable, lower risk and down to earth.

Cheers
Simon

We don't rule it out. Not at the present time however. As you will be aware its a resource intensive form of lending so doesn't match the usual business model of a building society. The rules governing building societies limit the amount of lending that can be done this way, unless it is through a subsidiary - and at present the regulators are heavily discouraging any new ventures at all, let alone more radical moves such as this. However, we'll keep the research going.