Sainsbury's Money has launched the Sainsbury's Personal Loan, powered by NatWest Boxed. Customers apply on the Sainsbury's Money website for loans between £1,000 and £35,000. Members of Nectar, Sainsbury's own loyalty programme, get a representative 6.3% APR by entering their Nectar card number. On 6 October, an instant access savings account followed, again with a better rate for Nectar members. NatWest Retail plans to launch a NatWest Nectar credit card later this year. These are the first products under the partnership the two companies announced on 1 April.
Sainsbury's Money is what is left of Sainsbury's Bank. NatWest bought the bank's personal loan, credit card and savings portfolios, a deal agreed in 2024 and completed in 2025. In July of this year, Sainsbury's gave up its banking permissions and relaunched its financial services as Sainsbury's Money, working with specialist partners instead of running a bank itself. Or to put it differently, the bank that took over the old customer books is now also powering the new products.
Is Sainsbury's Money embedded finance or a co-brand?
So is Sainsbury's Money embedded finance or just another co-brand? Spoiler: it depends on which product you look at. The upcoming NatWest Nectar card comes from NatWest Retail and carries the NatWest brand. This sounds like a classic co-brand. The personal loan, however, is a different story. It carries the Sainsbury's name, is sold on Sainsbury's own website and is priced through Nectar, with NatWest Boxed providing the platform, banking capability and operations behind it.
Today, users fill in an application on the Sainsbury's Money website and enter their Nectar card number to get the better rate. Sainsbury's adds its brand and the Nectar discount, while the application itself works much like any other online loan. The product journey happens on the non-financial brand's side, but it's far from integrated into an existing customer journey. Therefore, the next step would be to bring the products to where Sainsbury's customers already are, such as the Nectar app. That would make the loan and the savings account easier to find, and it would let Sainsbury's use what it knows from Nectar and the weekly shop, for example to show a personalised loan offer instead of one rate for every Nectar member. I believe this would be the right move. Let's see if these two companies agree.
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Sainsbury's and Tesco took different routes out of banking
The two large British retailers, Sainsbury's and Tesco, both left banking in recent years, but they ended up in different places. Barclays completed its acquisition of Tesco Bank in November 2024 and kept the brand, with the right to use it and sell products in Tesco stores for at least ten years. Tesco Bank still exists, but it is a Barclays business carrying Tesco's name. Sainsbury's, however, sold the customer books, kept its own brand and the customer front end, and now rents the banking layer from NatWest Boxed.
When Sainsbury's announced the wind-down in January 2024, I expected it to move to a distribution model, similar to how it sells insurance. It has gone a step further and kept control of the product brand and pricing. Whether that pays off probably depends on what Sainsbury's does with Nectar. Customers have plenty of choice for personal loans and savings accounts, and a familiar logo is rarely the deciding factor for where people put their money. A product that uses Nectar data and the shopping journey in ways a bank can't would give Sainsbury's something Tesco gave away.
