The first Alliance & Leicester branch to be renamed Santander, is the Horsefair branch in Leicester City Centre. This will be unveiled today by Alison Brittain, Santander UK's Executive Director for Retail Distribution.
Some 300 Alliance & Leicester branches across the rest of the UK will also be rebranded by the end of November, bringing the total number of Santander branches in the UK to over 1300, and completing a process that started on January 11, 2010, when the first Abbey branch was changed to Santander.
To celebrate the move, Santander has confirmed that Alliance & Leicester customers can benefit from a series of initiatives aimed at giving existing as well as new customers the chance to benefit from being part of one of the world's most successful and efficient banks.
- The UK's only fee-free current account, the Santander ZERO Current Account1, is available from today for anyone who currently holds an Alliance & Leicester mortgage or investment product with the bank or opens one. The account charges no fees even if the account is overdrawn.
- A £100 switching incentive for new customers opting to switch to Santander's current accounts. For the first time this incentive also applies to the Santander ZERO Current Account.
- From January 14, 2011, anyone with more than £10,000 in savings with Alliance & Leicester will also be eligible to open a Santander ZERO Current Account.
- In addition, any Alliance & Leicester current account customers will be able to use any Santander ATM2 in Spain free of charges, including foreign exchange fees.
The re-branding is in line with Santander's policy of operating under the Santander name and brand image in all the core markets in which it is present. Since the unified brand was introduced in 2005, Santander has rebranded in all its key markets, including Spain, Portugal, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Argentina.
Alison Brittain, Executive Director, Retail Distribution at Santander UK, comments:
"We are delighted to today unveil the first of our Alliance & Leicester branches to take on the Santander name. We have transformed into one of the most successful banks in the country over the last five years and the re-naming of Alliance & Leicester to Santander will enable us to further build on this success.
"The renaming of Alliance & Leicester makes it even more convenient for our customers to bank with us, as by the end of this month, they will all have access to more than 1,300 Santander branches in the UK. For Alliance & Leicester customers this is four times as many branches as they had access to before. Today's rebrand shows we are a challenger bank on the high street offering customers security, value and real choice."
Following the acquisition of Alliance & Leicester and the Bradford & Bingley savings business in 2008, Santander now has an 11% share of UK retail banking and 25 million UK customers. Over the next few years, the bank aims to increase the number of products each of its customers hold through increasingly competitive and market-leading products to its customer base.
Santander's UK strategy has been built on three pillars - improving efficiency at a faster and to a greater extent than its UK peers; using this competitive cost advantage to give customers better value-for-money products; which in turn drives more customer business to the bank.
