From Building Society to Bank: The Allied, 1970–89

Abstract

Originating in eighteenth-century England, the building society movement first entered South Africa in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it made rapid progress only after the mineral discoveries had quickened the pace of economic development. The two societies that came together in 1955 to form the Allied, the Rand Provident Building Society founded in 1890 and the Alliance Building Society in 1894, were products of this mineral-induced burst of growth. Their merger made the Allied one of the larger building societies in South Africa, but did not place it among the leaders of the movement. That came when the Allied merged with the Johannesburg Building Society in 1970, for the Johannesburg Society, although relatively young, having been founded only in 1942, was almost as large as the Allied. Their combined assets and liabilities took them to third position, behind the United and the South African Permanent Building Society.