COMPARED with much of the rest of the rich world, Britain has been provident.
Until the advent of the pension system in the late 1980s the RBI had a Provident Fund Scheme (PF) under which the employees and the bank contributed 10% each of the basic pay towards the corpus.
Shares in Phoenix Group, which controls 5m policies sold under brands such as Pearl, Royal & Sun Alliance and NPI, tumbled 11.5%, while Resolution, which has Friends Provident and Axa Sun Life under its umbrella, plummeted 7%.
Lawyers acting for Aberdeen Standard Investments have written to Provident seeking compensation for losses suffered by its failure to disclose details of the Financial Conduct Authority investigation into its Vanquis Bank subsidiary, The Times has learnt.
The four Ridgewood Savings Bank branches in Ridgewood and Mahwah will give Provident a strong presence in Bergen County that it did not have before, said Kevin J. Ward, executive vice president, chief operating officer and chief financial officer of Provident.
Citigroup and Britain's Provident Financial have both opened offices there, after years of booming growth in the late 1990's.
There is little evidence, yet, that legal doorstep lenders such as Provident Financial have picked up much of the business, or that illegal loan sharks have flourished.
In between, as well as one-day internationals, Tests and the ICC World Twenty20 involving England (who are now playing in Johannesburg), we have had the Friends Provident Trophy, the Twenty20 Cup and the NatWest Pro40.
Friends Provident has also imposed a six-month deferral period, and other pension providers may well follow.
The Provident has had articles even from Tiffany's and Black, Starr, and Frost.
