A decade ago Communisis won a huge ten-year contract with the then-Lloyds TSB that involved taking over the bank’s in-house printing operations. At the time it doubled the size of Communisis’ transactional printing business.
Since then Lloyds, along with other banks and utilities, has actively encouraged customers to move away from paper statements.
The Lloyds letter to customers is headlined: “We’ve moved your statements from post to paper-free.”
It says that from 1 November the bank is changing the way it sends statements to some savings accounts, and customers will have to access their statements digitally instead.
“We’re experiencing some issues and may not be able to send as many by post as we normally do,” Lloyds said.
“We appreciate you normally receive your statements by post, and I’m sorry if this change causes you any issues. We’ll let you know as soon as we’re able to offer you paper statements again.”
Communisis is currently up for sale and the clock is ticking on finding a solution for the future of the £256m turnover business, which employs more than 1,000 people.
An industry source said that Lloyds had been the biggest contributor to a two-part ‘Interim Funding Agreement’, totalling £13m, paid for by a raft of Communisis customers in order to keep the business – and their mission-critical communications – going.
A Lloyds spokesperson told Printweek: “We have nothing to share on any individual / specific supplier.”
The spokesperson stated: “We have to make sure customers receive regular statement information about their accounts so, to protect against any possible future issues impacting paper statements (like supply chain delays) we’ve taken a precautionary step to send only online statements to customers who already bank online.
“It’s a pre-emptive step to make our processes as robust and protected as possible from potential issues – it’s us being prudent and forward planning.”
The most recent accounts for Communisis, for 2021, detailed a 20% decline at its transactional printing business due to the ongoing switch to digital communications for items such as statements.
Despite a 6% uplift in sales at its brand deployment sourcing wing, the bottom line loss attributable to the shareholders of parent company OSG Holdings was nearly £25m, while the equivalent loss the prior year had been £39.8m.
US-headquartered OSG Holdings went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for the second time in 14 months in October and will “exit” its ownership of Communisis when it completes that process.
Communisis confirmed it was up for sale last month, but any deal is likely to be complicated by several factors including its legacy pension fund, which had a £20.8m deficit in the 2021 accounts.
Earlier this week a Communisis spokesperson told Printweek there was no formal update on the sale process at the present time.
