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Given the impact of the credit crunch, wage freezes, soaring fuel and food prices on individual investor's pockets it is unsurprising that eyes have turned away from our own shores and to overseas investors to snap up stakes in the nation's biggest lenders.

Nobody I spoke to was shocked when a substantial stake of Bradford & Bingley headed towards foreign hands. The only surprise expressed was the fact the direction the cash came from was west. The company that snapped up a stake in Bradford & Bingley was Texan. The land that brought us a sub-prime crisis and delivered the credit crunch was now bidding for a significant chunk in our biggest buy-to-let lender. How cheeky.

Before Resolution's bid became the latest talking point around the bowler-hatted bankers, the shock many expressed about interest in Bradford & Bingley was the fact cash had come from the western world rather than the far east.

What many are expecting is cash to flow into our banks from the east. No longer are we investing in developing the land of the rising sun - China will now start to push cash into our biggest financial institutions, is what many economic experts anticipate.

But just as few were able to anticipate the events of this summer, even less economists are willing to surmise what increased foreign ownership of our major banks will mean for mortgage advisers and their clients.

Despite the old disclaimer that past performance is no indication of future returns, perhaps we can get a view of the future from two of our biggest lenders - Abbey and HSBC. Abbey National and Midland Bank are a thing of the past and have already been bought up by overseas investors.

The purchase of Abbey by Spanish Banco Santander at first had many advisers concerned mortgage advisers would be sidelined in favour of pushing home loans through the bank's branch network.

However Banco Santander soon grasped intermediaries were key to dominating the mortgage market in the UK and while it did incur advisers anger with dual pricing for a few weeks the lender quickly came back with exclusive deals for its distribution partners.

Abbey bosses boast their foreign parentage has enabled them to stick with the mortgage market while others have found their coffers empty and had to retreat.

On the other hand we have HSBC, which has made it clear it does not see intermediaries as an essential part of its plans to snap up a growing share of the mortgage market.

Instead the the HSBC Group, named after its founding member The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, has chased mortgage business by making sure it offers some of the cheapest rates on the market.

In the last few weeks the bank, which was established in 1865 in Hong Kong and Shanghai to finance the growing trade between China and Europe, has hit mortgage advisers hard with its Rate Matcher deal.

A top boss at one of the nation's biggest building societies recently told me he was snapping up shares in some of the banks. Is he a traitor to his business model or just savvily recognising the price is right and there is nothing wrong with these institutions?

What is for sure, is if he feels banks are a good bet at the moment then undoubtedly so will cash laden overseas investors? Let us just hope the majority of these are more of Abbey's mindset than HSBC's.