About Abbey
About us
Background
In the UK, we have over 1,300 branches and around 4,500 cash machines, offering a full range of retail and corporate banking services to over 25 million customers.
Retail services include mortgages and savings, bank accounts, loans and credit cards, long-term investments including pensions and unit trusts, life, critical illness and unemployment cover and household insurance. We also provide offshore banking for expatriates.
Size
Our combined business is the third largest deposit taker and second largest mortgage lender in the UK, with five key business divisions – retail distribution, corporate and commercial banking, private banking, global banking & markets and intermediaries.
Becoming Santander
Santander acquired Abbey in 2004. In September 2008, we acquired Bradford & Bingley’s savings and branch network and in October 2008, we acquired Alliance & Leicester. Both acquisitions were part of our growth strategy in the UK and will help us to achieve our goal - to become the best commercial bank in the UK.
On 11 January 2010 Abbey and the savings business of Bradford & Bingley became known as Santander. This will be followed later in the year by Alliance & Leicester. The move delivers a significant advantage for customers as they can now use any of 1,000 Santander branches, rising to over 1,300 by the end of 2010.
Santander
Santander (SAN.MC, STD.N) is a retail and commercial bank, based in Spain, with operations in more than 40 countries. At the end of 2008, Santander was the largest bank in the euro zone by market capitalization and third in the world by profit.
Founded in 1857, Santander had EUR 1,168 billion in managed funds at the end of 2008. Following the acquisition of Sovereign Bancorp of the U.S. in January 2009, Santander has 90 million customers, more than 13,650 branches – more than any other international bank – and over 180,000 employees.
It is the largest financial group in Spain and Latin America, with leading positions in the United Kingdom and Portugal and a broad presence in Europe through its Santander Consumer Finance arm. In 2008, Santander registered €8,876 million in net attributable profit, an increase of 9% from the previous year excluding capital gains.