The familiar red flame logo of Santander now appears across the country with plans to replace and rebrand further branches of Abbey, Bradford & Bingley and Alliance & Leicester in order to maximise the impact of brand awareness.
This increase in brand prowess could go someway to explain Santander?s recent success. The bank?s net lending in 2009 reached ?7.6 billion, figures have shown. This amount is gauged to be around 50 per cent of the total mortgage market net lending last year in the UK.
Gross lending by Santander, which includes remortgaging, hit a high of 20.4 per cent during the last quarter of 2009. The total mortgage lending sum of around ?26.4 billion, indicates that the bank provided one fifth of mortgages, believed by Santander to be a company record.
Santander?s existing mortgages have risen from 12.9 per cent at the end of 2008 to 13.5 per cent at the close of last year, an increase also thought to be a record for the bank. Whilst Abbey has generally held a market share of 9 to 10 per cent and Alliance & Leicester a smaller 2 to 3 per cent, the Lloyds Banking Group subsidiary Halifax is the market leader with a share of approximately 20 per cent.
It is thought that the removal of many of the main lenders from the mortgage market has laid the path for the expansion and success of the Santander brand. The withdrawal of savings from other building societies also seems to have benefited the Santander group, indicated through the ?14.9 billion of new savings.
