Tipton & District Permanent Benefit Building Society was founded on 1 May 1901 becoming one of over 2,000 building societies in the UK.
By 1 July 1901 the first subscription meeting had been arranged at 30 Owen Street, Tipton. Each 'subscription is set at 2/6d or 1/3d each week. Fines are levied for any late payments and investors even had to pay for their own passbook! By September we had 53 members.
By 1934, our assets had grown to £257,239:0:7, an increase of £41,670 in the year.
We opened an office in Coseley and built a new strong room at our Head Office in Tipton.
The board was then made up of twelve Directors.
Due to the success of our Coseley office we renamed ourselves as Tipton & Coseley Permanent Building Society. The word 'Permanent' will later be dropped from our name in 1972.
The number of permanent building societies had reduced to 1,007, but combined assets have increased to £555million, up from £59million at the turn of the century.
Our assets now stand at £1.2million and a new Secretary is appointed. The Society undergoes an extensive modernisation process and by the mid-1970's our assets have increased to £10million.
The 60's and 70's were golden years for building societies. By 1979, only 287 societies remain but combined assets now exceed £45billion.
We continue to prosper, our office in Sedgley is a huge success and by the early 80's we opened our Dudley and Bilston branches, keeping our roots firmly in the Black Country.
Our assets break through £100million for the first time and we have moved in to a newly developed purpose built Head Office.
Our branch offices also undergo a refurbishment programme with state of the art computer systems installed to allow us to develop our mortgage and savings ranges.
Its the dawn of a new millennium and our first website goes live allowing us to extend our service to a new customer base. Our assets are now fast approaching £200million.
Having been losing finalists in 2003, we're delighted to be crowned winners of the award for best customer service in the Black Country. After another exceptional year where records were broken, our total assets now exceed £1/4 billion.
We relocated from our former Sedgley branch at Dudley Street to 6 Bull Ring, a prime location in the centre of town where we introduced two separate interview rooms for mortgage and financial service appointments and doubled the number of till positions for savers.
Our new website goes live with an improved look and feel and boasting a number of new features.
This is the first step in our long-term digital strategy designed to enhance customer experience and provide a greater choice in how you do business with us.
Elsewhere, we are crowned 'Professional Services Firm of the Year' at the annual Wolverhampton Law Society awards in recognition of our commitment to providing our customers with great service.
We introduced a ground-breaking mobile app, being the first building society to offer new and existing customers the ability to open, view and manage savings accounts on the go. Our assets increased to over £400m for the first time in our history.
