
Full list of Santander bank branches closing this week
More bank branches are shutting across the UK after Santander confirmed a list of closures.
The UK high streets have been obliterated in recent years, even before the coronavirus pandemic as people have turned to online shopping.
Changing customer habits are also reshaping banking, with many big names exiting towns and cities.
And it isn't just banks bidding farewell.
Poundland – a staple on every high street – announced a closure of almost 70 stores last week after a rescue deal.
Here are the Santander branches closing this week. Aberdare – June 24
Blackwood – June 23
Brecon – June 25
Cleveleys – June 23
Dungannon – June 23
Eltham – June 23
Glasgow LDHQ – June 24
Glasgow MX – June 23
Greenford – June 24
Magherafelt – June 24
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video
Santander told Metro previously that customer behaviour is changing and it needs to ensure that the business remains 'fit for future.' More Trending
A Santander spokesperson said: 'Our new combination of full-service branches, alongside Work Cafés, counter-free branches and reduced hours branches, aims to provide the right balance between digital banking and face-to-face money management and guidance.
'As a business, we must move with customers and balance our investment across all the places where we interact with customers, to deliver the very best for them now and in the future.'
The bank said that closing a branch is 'always a very difficult decision.'
View More »
It comes after the closure of ten Santander and eight NatWest branches last week.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
MORE: Martin Lewis' MSE shares major update on £100,000,000 Mastercard compensation payouts
MORE: Major UK high street bank could be put up for sale
MORE: Full list of 55 NatWest branches that will close in another blow to high street
Your free newsletter guide to the best London has on offer, from drinks deals to restaurant reviews.

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
ALEX BRUMMER: Beware of bank mergers - they can go horribly wrong
Europe's banking scene is very different from 2007 when Royal Bank of Scotland, aided and abetted by Santander and Fortis, gate-crashed a proposed £69billion merger of Barclays with Dutch lender ABN Amro. Barclays boss John Varley, married to a scion of one of the bank's founding families, even conceded that the headquarters would be canal-side in Amsterdam. RBS's intervention led to all the parties involved being bailed out by governments, with RBS, later renamed NatWest, only escaping the clutches of the Treasury on May 31 this year. The road back for European banking has been perilous. Paradoxically, Wall Street banks, at the core of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC), bounced back to health bigger and stronger. Among Europe's challengers, only HSBC, with its stranglehold on Hong Kong, is in the same league as JP Morgan and Bank of America. The repairs to Europe's fractured banking system are now more-or-less done and the industry is throwing off huge volumes of cash. Consultants Oliver Wyman note that European banks have returned $300billion to shareholders since 2022. The cash generated by a restored sector is fostering an M&A boom, with $36billion of deals this year and dizzying reports of new alliances. Andrea Orcel, the investment banker behind the disastrous RBS-ABN Amro transaction, is leading the charge. Now boss of Italy's UniCredit, he is in hot pursuit of Commerzbank in Germany. He has been also trying to buy Banco BPM in Italy in a deal which has been on and off. The last bout of European bank mergers was brought to a nasty end by the GFC. The subsequent 2010 euro crisis, which began in Greece, saw the banking systems in the Club Med: Greece, Italy and Spain, struggling with bad debts. There is now a recognition that Europe's fractured banking system is no match for the bigger US beasts. If the euro is to establish itself as an alternate reserve currency to the dollar, cross-border bank mergers and capital markets must be established. Christine Lagarde, president of the ECB, is leading the charge. Britain is on the sidelines of European debate. Authorities in Frankfurt and Brussels are gung-ho for cross-border mergers, but national authorities are more circumspect. BBVA's multi-pronged effort at buying Sabadell in Catalonia has shaken Britain's TSB, spun-out from Lloyds after the financial crisis, out of the tree. There is no end of speculation about the fate of TSB and for that matter Santander in the UK. The latter was pieced together by Santander chairman Ana Botin out of the remains of consumer banks Abbey National, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley in the detritus of the financial crisis. NatWest reportedly wanted to buy Santander but the price was lofty. Santander itself is in search of more scale by buying TSB. Meanwhile in the UK, challenger banks are consolidating with the supermarket banks now owned by High Street lenders. The owner of RBS spin-off Shawbrook is looking at a deal with Metro Bank. NatWest chief executive Paul Thwaite, freed of government interference, makes no secret of its ambition to bolt on more customers. But NatWest has taken itself out of the TSB race. The former RBS learnt the hard way that bank bids can go horribly wrong. Investing in customer loyalty and financing growth for UK start-ups would be a smarter deployment of surplus resources.


Metro
4 hours ago
- Metro
Full list of Santander bank branches closing this week
More bank branches are shutting across the UK after Santander confirmed a list of closures. The UK high streets have been obliterated in recent years, even before the coronavirus pandemic as people have turned to online shopping. Changing customer habits are also reshaping banking, with many big names exiting towns and cities. And it isn't just banks bidding farewell. Poundland – a staple on every high street – announced a closure of almost 70 stores last week after a rescue deal. Here are the Santander branches closing this week. Aberdare – June 24 Blackwood – June 23 Brecon – June 25 Cleveleys – June 23 Dungannon – June 23 Eltham – June 23 Glasgow LDHQ – June 24 Glasgow MX – June 23 Greenford – June 24 Magherafelt – June 24 To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Santander told Metro previously that customer behaviour is changing and it needs to ensure that the business remains 'fit for future.' More Trending A Santander spokesperson said: 'Our new combination of full-service branches, alongside Work Cafés, counter-free branches and reduced hours branches, aims to provide the right balance between digital banking and face-to-face money management and guidance. 'As a business, we must move with customers and balance our investment across all the places where we interact with customers, to deliver the very best for them now and in the future.' The bank said that closing a branch is 'always a very difficult decision.' View More » It comes after the closure of ten Santander and eight NatWest branches last week. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Martin Lewis' MSE shares major update on £100,000,000 Mastercard compensation payouts MORE: Major UK high street bank could be put up for sale MORE: Full list of 55 NatWest branches that will close in another blow to high street Your free newsletter guide to the best London has on offer, from drinks deals to restaurant reviews.


Times
7 hours ago
- Times
What the NatWest chief hopes to learn from his customers
Surrounded by about £10 million worth of high-grade metal stored in a warehouse on the outskirts of Leighton Buzzard, Paul Thwaite, the chief executive of NatWest, is a world away from London's Square Mile financial district. The boss of the FTSE 100 lender is visiting Dynamic Metals, a family-owned company in Bedfordshsire that supplies customers in defence, aerospace and Formula One and is one of the 1.5 million firms served by Britain's biggest business bank. Over the whine of industrial bandsaws, Alex Bailey, Dynamic's operations director, gives Thwaite, 53, a tour of the site, which has been extended using financing supplied by NatWest and is partly powered by roof-mounted solar panels funded by the bank's asset finance business. Trips like these are more than just a chance for Thwaite to see the lender's finance in action, however. They also give him a glimpse of business sentiment on the ground. Two hours earlier he attended a roundtable at the bank's Milton Keynes branch with 14 of its business customers, ranging from a professional services software company and IT security firm to a pipe coupling manufacturer and baby clothes maker. The overwhelming message from them was that despite all the talk from the government about prioritising economic growth, very little seemed to have changed in practice, and that red tape was stifling. 'I'm going to have to have a compliance department,' Seth Woodmansterne, the managing director of a greetings card supplier, told Thwaite, to laughter from the others. 'We're talking about greeting cards!' For Thwaite, who tries to meet customers at least every week, events like these are 'very valuable' and are a 'much better way of getting insight' than the reams of reports from consultancies that he reads. 'Hearing it direct is better than through others,' he told The Times in an interview afterwards. It's typical of the down-to-earth Liverpudlian, who previously ran the NatWest division that looks after its business customers and was suddenly thrust into the top job two years ago after Dame Alison Rose was pushed out by the previous government over the Nigel Farage account closure scandal. Ministers were able to intervene because the state at the time still owned 39 per cent of NatWest, a stake that was a legacy of the bank's £45.5 billion taxpayer bailout during the 2008 financial crisis. • Pay boost for NatWest chief from shareholders In a watershed moment for the lender, however, the government finally sold its remaining shares in NatWest last month, returning it to full private ownership after years of painful restructuring. The state's exit, which cemented a £10.5 billion loss for taxpayers, is 'a new chapter' for the group and its employees, thousands of whom, like Thwaite, were working at the lender during the bailout. Now that NatWest is out of the government's grasp, there is speculation in the City about what Thwaite does next. He has already put growth firmly on the agenda, having last year acquired both a £2.5 billion portfolio of residential mortgages from Metro Bank and most of Sainsbury's banking operations. This has spurred speculation in the City that further deals may be in the offing. It emerged this year that NatWest had made an unsuccessful approach for Santander's UK business. Last week Benjamin Toms, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, a stockbroker, also tipped NatWest as the most logical suitor for TSB. Sabadell, the Spanish owner of TSB, has confirmed that it had 'received preliminary non-binding expressions of interest' in its British high street business, one of which is believed to have come from Santander. Toms reckoned TSB could be worth £2.6 billion, which NatWest could pay without needing to raise capital, and that buying it would boost NatWest's market share in UK mortgages 'where the bank is underpenetrated' by about two percentage points. Yet Thwaite, who would not comment specifically on TSB, signalled that NatWest was not interested in a bid, insisting there was a 'very high bar' for any dealmaking 'financially and operationally and culturally' and that management were confident in their ability to grow the business organically. 'My responsibility to the company and the shareholders is to do things that make compelling sense for shareholders,' he said. 'Adding a couple of percentage points to market share is not an existential issue.' Thwaite has spent his entire career in banking. After studying management science and chemistry at the University of Manchester, he joined the Santander graduate scheme before quickly switching to NatWest in 1997. He has stayed ever since, rising through the ranks in a variety of roles before taking charge during the reputational crisis caused by the Farage debacle in July 2023. The chaotic departure of Rose was announced in the middle of the night and Thwaite received a call late in the evening from Sir Howard Davies, NatWest's then chairman, asking him to step up and become chief executive. 'It's a crucible moment because you suddenly find yourself in a position which you maybe hadn't anticipated two days before.' Even so, Thwaite said he 'wasn't fazed by it' and 'jumped straight in'. Since then, as well as having struck the Sainsbury's and Metro deals, he is at the forefront of industry lobbying efforts aimed at encouraging the government to scrap the ring-fencing regime, a central plank of Britain's reforms to make banks safer following the 2008 crisis by forcing them to legally separate their retail divisions from riskier operations. • Banks' ring-fencing rules under scrutiny by City watchdog The industry claims the rules are inefficient and have been supplanted by other regulatory changes, although critics would argue that axing the regime will make banks less safe. Thwaite insisted that 'NatWest will not forget the lessons of the financial crisis' and that he is simply posing the question, 'is it the right time to review' the rules? The government is likely to be receptive to the idea. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has put deregulation across industries at the centre of her drive to boost growth and is under pressure to show progress, with the latest official figures showing the UK economy contracted by a bigger-than-expected 0.3 per cent in April. The small businesses at the roundtable hosted by NatWest in Milton Keynes certainly felt they were getting little help from either central or local government, with Woodmansterne, the greetings cards boss, telling Thwaite 'I have no engagement whatsoever, despite trying, from MPs or council'. The NatWest boss said that 'there is no doubt from what I see in my interactions [with government] that they are determined to find a way to grow' and that 'you could argue it's still relatively early days'. 'What you've heard from the businesses today is they want, people want, to see the tangible benefits. I think we're approaching the moment of truth.' The boss of NatWest has retreated from the 'purpose-led' strategy of his predecessor that came under attack during the scandal over its decision to close the Coutts account of Nigel Farage. NatWest, which owns the Coutts private bank, became embroiled in the culture wars two years ago when Farage, who leads Reform UK, obtained Coutts internal documents about its decision. These showed that its reputational risk committee believed his public views 'were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation'. This stoked a row over freedom of speech and the affair ultimately cost Dame Alison Rose her job as NatWest chief executive, with Paul Thwaite promoted to replace her. It also led to close scrutiny of Rose's interest in diversity and inclusivity in business, which she had championed. Since then, there has been a shift in stance at the group. In the last annual report published under Rose there were 262 instances of the word 'purpose'. This compares with 125 in the most recent report under Thwaite, where there was no mention at all of the lender being 'purpose-led'. In an interview with The Times, Thwaite, who said he abhors corporate jargon, asked: 'Could you name the purpose?' He said the strategy now was 'about what we're doing with our customers, not what the bank's doing about particular issues' such as the energy transition and social mobility. 'I think a lot of the communication about the bank, both external and internal, talked to those topics, and it could have drawn the link more clearly between how those topics are in service of our customers.' However, he insisted that NatWest had not pulled back from environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies, even though there has been a broader shift away from these areas in the wider corporate world recently. 'We're still one of the biggest banks for sustainable finance. We have brilliant ESG teams, we're following our customers.'