Bradford & Bingley's savings business will be the latest to
be integrated into Banco Santander's global banking platform,
Partenon, after the banking giant agreed a £612m takeover.
B&B will join UK financial services groups Abbey and
Alliance & Leicester as part of the Santander group.
The Bradford & Bingley deal will create a combined UK
company with 1,286 branches and will give Santander 10% of UK
retail deposits with 24 million UK customers.
The remainder of Bradford & Bingley, including its mortgages
business, will be under public ownership.
Ralph Silva, analyst at Towergroup, said Partenon puts Santander
in a strong position during this period of consolidation.
"It is likely it will continue on this acquisition spree," he
said. "Imagine if there is something you have always wanted and
they are on sales, there is no way you would say no."
"Partenon could be a differentiator because it gives Santander
the ability to more easily and more quickly integrate
acquisitions," he said.
Santander is expected to make significant savings in IT through
integrating B&B's IT systems into Partenon.
The bank
completed the integration of Abbey to Partenon in the summer, a
key element in its plans to reduce costs at Abbey by £300m.
It also announced its
intention to acquire Alliance and Leicester for £1.3bn in July
and expects to make efficiency savings of between £30m and £50m by
integrating it with Partenon.
Santander sees Partenon as a route to creating a
single view of customers across all financial services units
such as current accounts, mortgages and loans - a long term goal of
all banks.
Santender's move comes as consolidation in the UK banking sector
is gathering pace. Its take over of Bradford & Bingley follows
news that Lloyds
TSB will acquire HBOS.
Bradford and Bingley announced last week that it was
closing a mortgage processing centre to cut costs. About 300
call centre staff will go at the processing unit in Hertfordshire
and the work will be transferred to a centre at Bingley in West
Yorkshire.