Trustee and Investment Services

Formed in 1967, from the Bank’s existing sixty year old trustee department and its regional income tax and investment offices, Martins Bank Trust Company Limited is the Trustee and Investment Services arm of the Bank. Are you a serious investor, or do you simply like to dabble on the stock market? Do you need help with your income tax affairs? Have you made a will? What about these new-fangled “Unit Trusts”? Martins Bank Trust Company is a great prize for Barclays, and the only example of a Martins Department that will (in effect) “take-over” a Barclays one, at the time of the Merger. The business of the newly named Barclaytrust company, will pay the bills for many years to come.

Quick off the mark - the merger of Martins Bank Trust Company and its subsidiaries is completed just one year after Barclays subsumed the Bank into the Barclays Group of Companies. Advertisements like this one - for the new “Barclaytrust” service - appear on 22 November 1969, on which day 100 offices are being fitted with new signage ready for business…

We are still trying to trace sufficient detail for Griffin Assurance Company Limited, and Union Registrar Services Limited, to enable individual pages for these companies to be added to this section of the Online Archive. In the meantime there is this short piece from the Newcastle Journal, 18 March 1968 which covers the purchase by Martins Bank of the Griffin Assurance Company:

{MARTINS Bank Trust Company have taken over the Griffin Assurance Company, a subsidiary of London and Edinburgh Life Insurance Company. Griffin issue life assurance contracts in the group now managed by MartinsUnicorn. The Purchase price has not been revealed.}

Still just ahead of the merger with Barclays, this is a shrewd move for Martins, whose acquisition in 1967 of the Unicorn Unit Trust business, would prove to be a golden egg for Barclays.

Text © Reach PLC and Find my Past created courtesy of THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD. Text reproduced with kind permission of The British Newspaper Archive