British banks set sights on ‘Polish pound’

Here's an interesting piece from the FT from last April 2007.

Britain’s banks are fighting an intensifying battle to capture a slice of the “Polish pound” – the disposable income of the more than 600,000 immigrants from Poland living in the UK.
The “Polish pound” – which a new calculation by the Centre for Economics and Business Research values at more than £4bn a year – offers a rapidly growing and largely untapped market for businesses in a wide range of sectors. With many Poles looking to send money to family or personal accounts back home, banks and financial services companies are at the forefront of the drive to win their custom.
On Wednesday sees the latest bid for their business when Lloyds TSB unveils a current account specifically tailored to new immigrant workers, including a radical money transfer card. It reflects the bank’s belief that offering simpler and cheaper international remittances is the best way to enhance its appeal to central European immigrants.
It has designed the service after 125,000 current accounts were opened with Lloyds TSB by Polish customers last year alone. Poles now make up the bank’s largest foreign national group.
The new Silver account, which has been coupled with a significant recruitment drive for Polish-speaking branch staff and a more accessible credit card, is designed to respond to competitors such as HSBC and Barclays who have also identified the Polish community as a strategic target.
HSBC last year launched its Passport account, which can be opened before a migrant arrives in the UK and offers discounted money transmission services.
Lloyds TSB has responded with its new account offering annual European travel insurance, which has been unavailable to recent arrivals, and a new card similar to a second debit card which can be pre-loaded with cash, sent to family members for use in their home country and topped up by telephone. The bank had found that many Polish customers were sending their debit cards home to family and friends, leaving themselves without a cash card in the UK.
Financial institutions are not alone in spotting an opportunity. Mainstream retailers are increasingly catering to Polish tastes. Tesco says Polish food is the fastest-growing minority range ever launched, while Heinz has introduced Pudliszki, its brand of Polish prepared foods, to British supermarkets.

Without doubt, therefore, telephone interpreting would assist UK Financial Institutions to reach out to all nationalities - not just Polish - around the UK. It is clearly impractical to be able to accommodate the full range of languages spoken across the UK via recruitment alone. Equally, the revenues available from the collective migrant population must be truly vast if the Polish opportunity is in the region of £4bn

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