Few names have loomed larger over the British high street than Halifax, and after 173 years it is being retired. Lloyds Banking Group, which has owned the lender since 2009, has confirmed it will phase out Halifax as a standalone brand and move all customer accounts to Lloyds over time.

For account holders, the headline is reassuring: there is nothing you need to do. Lloyds says customers will be contacted directly about the changes through trusted channels, including the Halifax app, online banking, email and by letter. Crucially, sort codes and account numbers will stay the same, and there is no change to the deposit protection savers rely on.

The move had been trailed for weeks. Reports in May flagged that the group was weighing up whether to drop Halifax altogether, and the decision has now been formalised. The logic, as Lloyds tells it, is simplification. Running four overlapping consumer brands – Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and MBNA – has looked increasingly hard to justify as the distinction between them has faded, and as customers migrate en masse to a single app.

That last point is the real engine behind the shake-up. More than 21 million Lloyds Banking Group customers now use its mobile app as their main way of banking, a shift that has already prompted the group to close a further 95 branches across its brands. When most people rarely set foot in a branch, the commercial case for maintaining separate names on separate shopfronts weakens considerably.

Halifax has been part of the national furniture since it was founded in West Yorkshire in 1853. It granted its first mortgage that year and grew into one of the UK’s largest building societies before demutualising and, eventually, being folded into Lloyds during the financial crisis. At its peak in the early 2000s, a customer services adviser named Howard Brown became its most recognisable face, singing his way through a run of television adverts that lodged the brand firmly in the public memory.

Jas Singh, Lloyds Banking Group’s chief executive of consumer relationships, sought to soften the sentimental blow. “As Halifax changes to Lloyds, our Halifax customers will keep everything they know and love today – the same fantastic app design, the same friendly faces in our branches – even the same sort code and account number,” he said. “But as Lloyds customers, they’ll get the best innovation and experiences we offer.”

There is a regional dimension too. Lloyds insists it remains committed to the town of Halifax and the wider Yorkshire and Humber region, where roughly 3,000 staff are based at its Trinity Road office. No job cuts have been announced as part of the transition, and Halifax branches will either be rebranded as Lloyds or their customers moved to a nearby Lloyds site during 2027.

For savers, the most important detail sits in the small print. As the group confirmed in May, and reiterated in its official announcement, account numbers will not change and there is no change to protection under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which safeguards eligible deposits up to £85,000 per person, per banking licence. Customers who hold money with both Halifax and Lloyds should, as ever, check how that licence structure affects their own cover.

The disappearance of Halifax is part of a broader rewiring of British retail banking, one that has already seen challengers such as Revolut secure a full UK banking licence and traditional lenders thin out their branch estates. For customers, little changes tomorrow. But the slow fade of a 173-year-old name is a reminder of how quickly the familiar architecture of the high street is being redrawn.

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Britain has cemented its position as Europe’s undisputed home for high-growth business, with a record 80 “unicorn” companies now valued at more than $1 billion apiece.

The country’s strength in building promising financial technology and artificial intelligence firms has helped it record the third-highest number of unicorns anywhere in the world. Only the United States and China are home to more private companies worth in excess of $1 billion, according to a new global ranking.

The UK now boasts a record 80 unicorns worth a combined £242.4 billion, overtaking India to take third place in the annual index produced by the Hurun Research Institute, the Shanghai-based firm behind the closely watched Global Unicorn Index.

With 23 new unicorns minted over the past 12 months, the research concluded that Britain had reinforced its “position as Europe’s undisputed start-up capital”, noting that it now has more unicorns than Germany, France, the Netherlands and Sweden combined.

The nation’s unicorn count has nearly doubled since 2016, and the “pipeline of new companies entering the billion-dollar club is the strongest it has ever been”, Hurun said. In total, the firm tracked 1,603 unicorns across 52 countries, with the combined value of the world’s unicorns rising 43 per cent to $8 trillion.

The number of unicorns a country produces is watched closely as a barometer of the health of an economy, its appetite for innovation and its ability to create companies with the potential to scale globally.

Britain’s continued strength comes against a backdrop of concern about the appeal of the London Stock Exchange as a home for the most promising businesses, as well as government efforts to nurture emerging domestic technology firms amid questions over the wisdom of relying on a handful of American giants for essential technology.

Ministers have already stepped in to keep home-grown talent listed in the UK, part of a wider push to strengthen the appeal of the London Stock Exchange after a run of de-listings and companies shifting their primary listings overseas. That includes fresh government backing for AI firms weighing a domestic float.

Revolut, the financial services group, remains the UK’s most valuable unicorn with a £57.8 billion valuation, having recently leapfrogged Barclays in value after an Nvidia-backed deal. It is followed by Nscale, the artificial intelligence data centre business, worth £11.6 billion at its last funding round, Hurun said.

Fintech companies account for a third of the UK’s unicorns and more than half of their total value. It is a sector in which fresh names keep emerging, from data platforms to challenger lenders, with recent arrivals such as 9fin reaching unicorn status with British Business Bank support.

Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, was the fastest-growing sector for UK unicorns, with nine such companies worth a combined £40.6 billion, quadrupling in value in a single year. Just ten of the UK’s 80 unicorns are developing physical products, with the rest building software or services.

Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher at Hurun Research Institute, said the UK had shown it was “the best gateway into European tech” for international investors.

Hurun’s broader global report identified a record 1,603 unicorns worldwide, with six of the world’s ten most valuable examples working on AI, an industry that also dominated the list of private companies posting the largest valuation increases.

“The concentration of economic power in a small number of AI companies is unprecedented,” the report said.

The enormous valuations attached to leading AI businesses have prompted concern about a bubble in public markets, and there are signs the boom is reshaping the venture market too. Analysts say the capital-raising environment has tilted towards founders working in AI, while remaining challenging for many entrepreneurs in other sectors.

AI is accounting for an unprecedented share of total deal value in European venture capital, and “non-traditional investors” such as corporations and hedge funds are joining funding rounds at record levels.

Other sectors producing UK unicorns include energy, with four such businesses, among them Octopus Energy, the UK’s largest energy supplier, and its spin-off Kraken Technologies, as well as life sciences, which accounts for eight unicorns.

Hurun’s analysis of the 136 founders behind the UK’s largest private technology companies underlined the industry’s continuing lack of diversity. More than one in four attended Oxford or Cambridge. Only eight are women, prompting Hurun to warn that “the UK is failing to capture the full potential of its female entrepreneurial talent.” More encouragingly, more than half of all the founders were born outside the UK.

The UK’s unicorns have an average valuation of £3.2 billion, Hurun said, and took an average of 3.6 years to reach the $1 billion mark.

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U.S. stocks ​finished slightly lower on Wednesday with falling technology shares, but gains in Meta Platforms provided some support along with comments from Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh that inflation risks had eased recently. Warsh also said he will stick firmly to the U.S. central ‌bank’s 2% inflation ⁠target and “disappoint” ⁠anyone who expects loose monetary policy despite President Donald Trump’s call for interest rate cuts.

Oil prices rose sharply at the start of ​the Iran war. Traders slightly pared their rate-hike expectations as Warsh spoke, but they still expect at least one hike ​from the U.S. central bank this year, according to data compiled by LSEG. Shares of Meta Platforms rallied after Bloomberg News reported that it is building a cloud business to sell excess AI computing capacity.

“This does ​seem to be something that is likely to continue to help the ⁠stock,” said ‌Tim Ghriskey, senior portfolio strategist at Ingalls & Snyder in New York. “It has underperformed the ​Mag 7 group” ​of other megacap stocks. Meta shares remain down for the year to date.

An ⁠index of semiconductors was off sharply.

Investors are keeping a close eye ​on talks between the U.S. and Iran and they remain cautious, especially ​with a long U.S. holiday weekend coming up, Ghriskey said.

According to preliminary data, the S&P 500 lost 14.34 points, or 0.19%, to end at 7,485.02 points, while the Nasdaq Composite lost 169.56 points, or 0.65%, to 26,044.16. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 3.62 points, or 0.01%, to 52,315.58.
The key monthly U.S. jobs report is due out on Thursday, while the market will be closed Friday ahead of the Fourth ‌of July holiday. U.S. Vice President JD Vance said discussions between the U.S. and Iran were going well as they held indirect technical talks in Qatar about the Strait of ​Hormuz on Wednesday, ​adding Washington would not return to ⁠full combat unless necessary. The U.S. and Iran signed an interim accord last month. Investors are also digesting data from the Institute for Supply Management that showed U.S. manufacturing activity had slowed in June but was ​still solid.The day’s lackluster performance comes after a strong second quarter for the indexes. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite registered their biggest quarterly gains since 2020, while the Dow marked its best showing since 2022.

Among the day’s decliners, shares of Alcoa fell after Australia’s South32 agreed to sell most of its aluminium assets to Alcoa.

BSE Index Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of BSE, on Wednesday launched the BSE REITs and Commercial Real Estate Index, a new benchmark designed to track the performance of listed real estate investment trusts (REITs) and companies with significant exposure to commercial real estate.

The index includes companies belonging to the REIT category as well as firms classified under the residential and commercial projects segment that derive meaningful exposure from commercial real estate assets and rental income.

The BSE REITs and Commercial Real Estate Index has a base value of 1,000, with September 2022 as the first value date. It will be reconstituted semi-annually in March and September.

Announcing the launch, Ashutosh Singh, MD & CEO of BSE Index Services, said the index is the first in the industry to provide focused exposure to India’s yield-generating real estate ecosystem, including office, retail and leasing-led business models.

He said the index combines listed REITs with companies having significant commercial real estate assets and rental income streams. It also incorporates a 20% cap on individual constituents to ensure diversification, making it suitable for creating investable products and targeted investment strategies.

According to BSE, the index can serve as the underlying benchmark for exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and index funds, while also being used for benchmarking portfolio management services (PMS), mutual fund schemes and institutional portfolios.
Also read: Only 1/5th the size of NSE? Why Jefferies predicts 27% upside for this near-monopoly stockThe launch expands BSE’s suite of thematic indices and comes amid growing investor interest in income-generating commercial real estate assets through listed REITs and related companies.

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The Halifax brand is being scrapped after 173 years, with all customer accounts to be rebranded to Lloyds.

Lloyds Banking Group, which has owned Halifax since 2009, confirmed the move after reports in May said it was considering phasing out Halifax as a standalone brand.

Lloyds said it remained committed to the town of Halifax and the wider Yorkshire and Humber region, where 3,000 staff are based at its Trinity Road office.

Halifax Labour MP Kate Dearden described the move as “bitterly disappointing” and said she had been in discussions with Lloyds to “ensure their commitment and continued investment in Halifax long into the future”.

Lloyds Banking Group’s chief executive of consumer relationships Jas Singh said very little would change for customers.

“As Halifax changes to Lloyds, our Halifax customers will keep everything they know and love today – the same fantastic app design, the same friendly faces in our branches – even the same sort code and account number,” he said.

No job cuts are being announced as part of the shake-up, and Halifax branches will either be rebranded to Lloyds or shifted to a nearby branch throughout 2027.

It is understood the decision was rooted in efforts to simplify the group’s portfolio, with the distinction between Halifax and Lloyds seen as becoming less prominent in recent years.