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
Lloyds mandate all new employed staff need a LBG account and to be paid into it before you could start.
Then just change your bank details once you’ve started. Weird setup.
They did the same years back when they took over Abbey who had free business accounts for life. Despite being for life they introduced charges. At that time I moved my account but they sent me and others £200 compensation for reneging on the free for life promise. They don’t learn as it seems like they’re doing it again. No such thing as a free lunch.
People have said Santander’s defence is that there was a change in their T and C’s in 2015 or something allowing them to do this. There must be a reason why they are trying to do this again
This is what they are saying:
Santander told the Guardian that accounts that predated the 2008 merger of Abbey and Alliance & Leicester were migrated into its Business Every Day account in 2015 and that the terms and conditions of that contract did not include the free for ever promise.
Wonder if any business account users bothered to read those terms and conditions
It seems the terms and conditions said users can be moved to a different account. Now the argument is whether the promise of free banking forever applied to a specific account or if it was too general to do so.
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Pretty sure if a formal complaint was raised for those on the free forever account, they’d win, unless there were terms in which worded in a way allowed Santander to charge later down the line.
I just wonder why Santander is trying this again if they don’t think something has changed for them to succeed this time.
They’re probably just hoping time and inertia will mean most people will just suck it up.
They’ll get a few complaints - and will probably pay them off but in the long term it removes a potential (permanent) issue with a specific account.
I’m assuming this specific account has not been available to new customers for over a decade so they may not have many businesses still on it anyway.
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There might not be many businesses left with the free accounts, but they are a very vocal minority who aren’t taking the matter lying down. There are already 22 pages about it over on MSE.
New Edge credit card customers now only get 1% cashback, capped at £10 a month and fee increased to £4.
I was literally thinking about switching and getting this, definitely not now 
.
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What is their problem? Like make your product simple. Or just stop making everything worse
The Edge credit card used to be a pretty decent deal, I’m 6 months in with it and was planning to cancel after 12 as the 1% cashback wasn’t worth it even when capped at £15 and only £3 a month. I guess apart from Chase there aren’t that many cashback cards offering 1% or over though