Abbey, A&L and B&B to become Santander - no change to savings protection

Former_MSE_Guy

This thread is to discuss the following news story:

Abbey, A&L and B&B to become Santander - no change to savings protection

Hazzanet

And? The name will change, but the service will still be poor.

molerat

Spanish giant Santander insists it is "committed" to retaining the group's branch network.

A small market town like mine with 3 Santander branches ..... I don't think so. More redundancies and empty high street shops even though they say different.

MSE Guy please change the heading and add "for now" as in the article heading.

alanq

molerat wrote: »

MSE Guy please change the heading and add "for now" as in the article heading.

Indeed. In BBC TV's Working Lunch the Santander representative did not even commit to the end of 2010. However, she did say that there was a marketing advantage in continuing separate licensing.

leachyd

molerat wrote: »

Spanish giant Santander insists it is "committed" to retaining the group's branch network.

A small market town like mine with 3 Santander branches ..... I don't think so. More redundancies and empty high street shops even though they say different.

MSE Guy please change the heading and add "for now" as in the article heading.

Of course they will close branches as you're asserting, but if you ask me they are well within their rights to. It wont have much effect on customers if they close a few and they'll be saving money. Santander are after all, providing banking services for profit, not because they want to do us all a favour. The board and management run the company essentially to maximise shareholder wealth, so the share holders will be happy. And before everyone bashes the shareholders, the whole point of public and private limited companies was to encourage the masses to invest small amounts in order to provide vital infrastructure etc. I.e without shareholder investment these places wouldn't even exist....but then you lot would like that probably?! (even though you all use banks!)

Anyway, if you were in Santander's shoes i don't doubt you might do the same?

simon_templar_2

Word today from Alison Brittan is that they aim to have 1300 branches, closures were not mentioned. Santander wants to increase the branch number. Alliance & Leicester have many in the Midlands, this is an area not heavily saturated with Abbey branches. The plan is to change Abbey and B&B into Santander branches early 2010. A&L will rebrand much later in 2010. The ultimate plan is all will use Partenon and customers from the 3 entities can transact across the board.

System

Interestingly, according to Radio 4, they will keep the Cahoot brand.

Barrie_P_Spink

If you have a account with the Alliance and Leicester you can use all the Post Office Branch Network as well. This arrangement is quite useful but I wonder if this will continue or will it be scrapped.
If it is scrapped then it will make things very hard for a large number of Rural Post Offices as this would with draw access to a bank for their customers.
Barrie P Spink