ALLIANCE & Leicester Commercial Bank, in Bootle, is to be rebranded as Santander Corporate Banking, following last year’s takeover by the Spanish bank.
Santander’s three UK businesses, Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley Savings, will adopt the Santander global brand and name in 2010.
From today, the bank will begin the rebranding of its 20 regional corporate and commercial banking divisions to Santander Corporate Banking.
Steve Pateman, head of Santander Corporate Banking, said: “Santander has a clear strategy of increasing its presence in the UK corporate market and the rebrand to Santander Corporate Banking is a clear demonstration of our ambition to become the bank of choice for businesses.
“By bringing together the local knowledge of Alliance & Leicester’s regional corporate banking centres, the specialist sector knowledge of Abbey’s corporate banking teams and Santander’s credibility as one of the strongest and best capitalised banks in the world, we can provide customers with a very compelling banking service.
“We are building a business that has relationship banking at its heart. We plan to expand our regional network and are recruiting additional relationship managers, giving us the opportunity to develop close relationships with local businesses helping them through some of the challenges they may now face towards longer-term success.”
The first centres to be rebranded will be in Manchester and Nottingham, with the other 18 centres to follow by the end of 2009.
Santander has 90m customers, more than 14,000 branches and over 180,000 employees across the world. Its commercial banking operation at Bootle employs 2,000 people.
