Could be doing all of this just to make Santander UK even more attractive in a few years, in theory I guess.
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I think they would be getting to the point of being too big to sell off with TSB.
Any of the big players already couldn’t buy Santander without taking to monopoly levels.
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I think it would be a strange process anyway to go through all this just to leave. The rumours were never that they 100% wanted to leave, just consider the possibilities of what to do with their UK business, which this fits into
What makes you feel that is the case?
There are plenty of banks and a bit spread of costumers. Even if someone brought Santander, it wouldn’t be the only game in town.
The purchase of TSB makes me wonder whether they will keep the name or merge it all into Santander. Sadly there will like be some redundancies and closed branches over time.
Should become Santander TSB. Such a catchy name
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The Santander Bank
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Does anyone actually believe they didn’t at least consider leaving the UK?
“We never thought of leaving the U.K. The U.K. is very important for us,” Santander Chief Financial Officer Jose Garcia Cantera told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday. “It’s actually the largest balance sheet of all the countries [where] we operate. It’s a high quality, low-risk business, predictable returns, in hard currency, in sterling, and this helps to stabilize our risk-return profile.”
He added that the U.K. has “always been a very important and core component of Santander’s diversification strategy.”
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Can anyone here write me a cheque for £5,000? I just want to check something. I’ll pay it back, honest.
Which banks have been added to the link via open banking?
This is not good for us switchers.
What’s changed? Nothing has far as I can tell. They don’t even have TSB!
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The CMA could block a merger/acquisition that would create a monopoly. It was ignored for the Lloyd’s/HBOS merger but that was a very difficult moment of banking history.
I.E Lloyds / HSBC / NatWest / Barclays (UK Big 4) wouldn’t be able to buy Santander and suddenly they’d have a monopoly.
Who would spend £15bn on buying Santander… would have to be a foreign bank with little to no presence. I.e. Chase
However given the CFOs statement today - seems it was never on the cards at all
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Funny to see they haven’t even got TSB in the list if they’re going to be pursuing a merger 
If Santander buy TSB it wouldn’t result in a monopoly. Barclays would still be bigger and so would HSBC.
I’d agree that if one of the bigger banks brought the combined group it would distort the market and possibly get rejected but it still wouldn’t in my eyes be a monopoly.
Sorry - I meant if now another UK retail bank buys Santander. That simply wouldn’t be allowed with competition law.
Santander buying TSB is fine, as Santander aren’t a big player today. They will be once this transaction completes.
Until that situation arises, it’s difficult to know exactly what would happen if someone like Barclays did try and buy Santander.
Barclays could throw money at Link and/or The Post Office to say they’ll run campaigns to encourage competition.
Look at the mobile phone market - there used to be 5 big players - Orange, o2, Vodafone, Three and T-mobile. That’s now been reduced to just 3 - BT/EE, Vodafone/Three and Virgin/o2. Whilst there’s a lot of virtual mobile networks (Sky, Tesco Mobile etc) it still means that just 3 large companies control the core infrastructure of mobile phones but that was kinda waved through by the Competition Authority because at each stage the companies doing the buying/being bought argued that the market meant there was more than enough competition to ensure they wouldn’t have a large advantage and be able to monopolise the market.
With banking I’d say it’s even easier to argue that - the current ‘Big Four’ (Natwest, Lloyds, Barclays, HSBC) are all pretty evenly balanced. If Lloyds or Natwest tried to by Santander (as the current number 1 and 2 in terms of current accounts - Santander will become number 3 after the TSB acquisition) that’ll probably raise a few eyebrows, but I could see HSBC or Barclays being allowed to go ahead and purchase the UK arm of Santander if it was put up for sale. And I would suspect if Nationwide decided to buy the UK arm of it, their bid would be welcomed by the Government and the various competition watchdogs (I’m not expecting Nationwide to be interested in this or have the money for it btw - they’re busy sorting out Virgin Money right now!).
Santander is a slightly strange player in the UK banking sector. Obviously, their ‘home’ is in Spain - but their actual biggest market is in Brazil and their other main markets is Mexico and the USA. Obviously Brazil and Mexico have a strong connection to their Spanish culture - not sure if their USA operational also targets that population as well.
Santander’s CFO says their “largest balance sheet” is in the UK. Does that mean they make their largest profit here?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2025-07-02/santander-cfo-says-tsb-brand-has-a-lot-of-value
I thought Brazil was their most profitable market. But perhaps in assets the UK has more. If they own their London HQ, and central London branches, plus the deposits they hold - that must be quite a bit!
(I recall when I lived in Brazil - Santander had a contract with the Government to mandate all civil servants/public workers to deposit their salary in a Santander Brazil account! This was huge sums considering large numbers of Brazilians are public workers)
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Sources are still saying Santander did considering leaving the UK. It was the sale of their Polish business just before Sabadell wanting to sell TSB that was key in them being able to buy TSB. The Barclays offer was apparently very close in value to Santander’s offer