In stark contrast to other banking groups, which are reducing their high street presence, Santander is planning to open dozens of new branches as part of its plans to make further advancement into the UK banking market.
The Spanish giant hopes to grow in the small to medium sized enterprise market and support its mortgage lending, as it feels that customers prefer to do business in person rather than on the internet or over the phone.
Santander plans to add 40 new branches by 2015. The first three branches are scheduled to open over the next month in Northallerton, South Shields and Saffron Walden.
The lender, which bought Alliance & Leicester, Abbey National and Bradford & Bingley, has sites in 750 out of the top 1,000 locations in the UK and the new openings will be in areas where it has no presence.
This will help the banking group to fill in the gaps in its national branch network.
The bank is also planning to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on modernizing 150 of its 1,200 branches in a bid to lift business levels.
Santander’s UK operations made a pre-tax profit of £549 million for the first half of 2013, a 20.1 per cent increase on the same period in 2012.
The increase in profits was driven by a surge in the number of people paying for their current accounts and its growing business loans book. Santander’s business lending grew 11 per cent to £21 billion.
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