Santander to rebrand UK high street banks

SOME OF Britain’s best known banking brands are set to disappear from the high street after Santander, the Spanish bank, said it would rebrand all of its UK operations under its own name from next year.

Santander, which first entered the UK market with the purchase of Abbey in 2004, now has 1,300 bank branches after acquiring Alliance Leicester and the savings business of Bradford Bingley last year.

The Spanish bank is to spend £12 million (€13.8 million) rebranding branches and products with its distinctive logo of a white flame on a red background.

Antonio Horta-Osorio, chief executive of Santander in the UK, said that when the Spanish bank entered the UK in 2004, public awareness of the Santander name was 20 per cent.

However, by last year it had climbed to 80 per cent, helped by Santander’s sponsorship of the British Grand Prix and partnership with Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton.

“Customers feel comfortable with Santander and see it as a safe haven in the UK,” he said.

“You can see this from the deposit inflows we saw last autumn.”

He added that rebranding and the introduction of Santander’s IT system Partenon into AL and BB would mean that by next year, customers would be able to use any of Santander’s 1,300 branches.

The rebranding will take place in stages. Santander will rebrand its Abbey credit cards in the second half of the year and Abbey and BB’s 1,000 branches will be rebranded from the first quarter of 2010. AL will be rebranded by the end of 2010.

The move will kill off some of the UK’s best known banking brands.

Abbey National – created in 1944 from the merger of the Abbey Road and National building societies, themselves 19th century institutions – was the first society to demutualise and float on the stock market in 1989.

By the 1970s, it had been one of Britain’s best known financial brands, urging customers to “get the Abbey habit”. In the 1990s, it recruited comedian Alan Davies, with the catchphrase: “Because life’s complicated enough.”

AL, which demutualised in 1997, was best known for a series of adverts starring actors Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.

BB, which demutualised in 2000, was marketed by the fictional bowler hat-wearing Messrs Bradford and Bingley, exuding a reassuring air of conservative financial solidity. – (Copyright Financial Times Limited 2009)