Santander's Ana Botin on buying TSB — and being fired by her father

Times

2 days ago

Ana Botin will enjoy a margarita this weekend. It will be a rare treat for one of the world's top bankers who usually indulges in alcohol only every couple of months.
But as she pops up on a screen from her office in Madrid, the boss of Santander declares she is 'going to celebrate' after Tuesday's announcement that the Spanish bank had won the auction for TSB, fending off Barclays.
The deal, which values TSB at up to £2.9 billion, boosts Santander's presence in Britain, where its red flame logo and advertisements fronted by Ant and Dec mean it is already a household name.
Botin, 64, declares: 'The deal is strategically important for us because it helps with our diversification, it allows us to be more competitive for customers in the UK and, very importantly, it also allows us to deliver higher profitability sooner for shareholders.'
The scion of the Spanish banking family has agreed to a rare profile interview after pulling off a transaction that has caught the City by surprise. There had been persistent speculation that Santander was actually trying to exit Britain, 20 years after it arrived by buying Abbey National and then Bradford & Bingley and Alliance & Leicester.
Instead, Botin is making a fresh commitment to the UK, 11 years after she was named as executive chairman following the sudden death of her father, Emilio. He was already the third generation of the family to run a bank that started life as a conduit for trade between the northern Spanish port of Santander and Latin America in the 1800s and has since become the largest bank in the eurozone. With a stock market value of €108 billion (£93 billion), Santander is bigger than any London-listed bank apart from HSBC.
Santander will not take control of TSB until the first quarter of next year, assuming its shareholders back the deal and the competition authorities do not intervene, but concerns are mounting about the branch closures and job losses that will be needed to achieve Santander's cost-cutting goals.
'There will be efficiencies and not all of them will affect branches or people,' Botin insists.
The combined entity will have 175 branches from TSB and 350 from Santander, giving as she puts it, more options for TSB customers to use branches. Even so, analysts at Jefferies reckon that 100 will have to go to meet financial targets.
Botin notes there is very little overlap in Scotland where TSB is bigger. Some of the TSB branches might fit with the approach Santander has been taking to have cafés in its branches. 'We're already looking at some of the amazing buildings that TSB has and we believe these can be really very cool, attractive places,' she says. 'We need to grow with young people and young people like to go to these places with these much better experiences.'
She said that the TSB brand may survive, despite Santander's decades-long effort to rebrand globally under its red logo. 'It has a lot of value and we're going to really think hard about what it means and so there might be solutions, which is that not everything becomes Santander. That's one option we're seriously considering,' she says.
Might that mean TSB mortgages, or current accounts, for instance? 'We're thinking right now,' she says, describing it as speculation, 'but yes, we could have … TSB mortgages, why not?'
For TSB's 5,000 staff it adds a new wave of uncertainty after a turbulent ten years in which the bank was spun out of Lloyds Banking Group, listed on the stock market and then bought by Sabadell, the Spanish bank. Sabadell is now selling TSB as it fends off a hostile bid from Spanish rival BBVA, the country's second-largest bank after Banco Santander.
Botin, who admits Santander took a look at TSB ten years ago, has some words of comfort for staff: 'We are really focused on delivering the numbers [cost savings] the right way. We need to find a balance between doing the right thing for our people. I always say our people come first.'
As she speaks on the video call in her impeccable English delivered with a Spanish intonation, she is keen to point out that the cause for her celebratory margarita is the share price. This has ended the week higher despite talk in the City that Santander paid too high a price for TSB.
'That was really the proof that we're not just doing what's right according to us, but that the market is recognising it,' she says.
The share price has been her bugbear. Until earlier this year, it was down 30 per cent from when she took over. Now it is now at its highest level in a decade. Part of the decline was her decision to embark on a €7.5 billion cash-call in the early days of her tenure and to spend €6 billion a year upgrading IT systems.
She waves a piece of A4 paper to show how she told staff: 'Here you have a blank piece of paper, build me a bank from scratch that is the best for customers.'
Santander's digital bank, known as Openbank, has been used to make a big push into retail banking in America, and will also come to Britain, she says. 'Openbank is my blueprint to change Santander.'
Ana Patricia Botín-Sanz de Sautuola O'Shea is the eldest of six children. She credits her mother, Paloma O'Shea, a marchioness and accomplished pianist, for 'her incredible education', ability to play the piano and passion for sports, particularly golf, which she was taught by the late Seve Ballesteros, her brother-in-law.
Educated at the Roman Catholic boarding school St Mary's in Ascot, she went on to do a degree in economics at private women's college Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, which she completed at Harvard. Botin is also fluent in French, speaks German and Italian socially and can understand Portuguese.
Her career started at JP Morgan in New York, where she got to know Bill Winters, who runs the FTSE 100 bank Standard Chartered. He now regards her as a friend. 'Her super-sharp mind and focus on transformative progress has always set her apart. Ana combines this with a directness and approachability which I find most welcoming and helpful,' Winters says.
Botin joined Santander in 1988 — seven years into her career — before being 'asked to leave' by her father in 1999. This was to allay concerns about the family's influence at Santander during the takeover of rival Spanish lender Banco Central Hispano.
After setting up a tech firm she returned three years later to become executive chairman of the Spanish bank Banesto before being parachuted in to run the UK business in 2010 when António Horta-Osorio quit to go to Lloyds.
When her 79-year-old father died suddenly on September 9, 2014, Botin recalls she was in London 'watching Yes, Prime Minister with my son when I got the call'. She arrived in Madrid the next day and was quickly appointed his successor.
So does being a Botin provide privilege or pressure? What was her working relationship like with her father, who was known for his deal-making skills and credited with steering Santander through the banking crisis without a taxpayer bailout?
She admits she got a 'leg up' but talking about her father she says: 'He never ever favoured me. He would probably actually treat me worse than others in terms of not letting me speak up at meetings and that is why maybe I have a style which is a bit' — she breaks off to explain — 'when a women is very assertive they call us aggressive, right?
'I tell the story of being in a meeting with a lot of CEOs — men and women — and the person said 'raise your hand, anybody who during your career has been called aggressive'. All the women in the room put up their hands, not a single man. But that's the style I learned from the men and even more so from my father. He wanted to make sure that I did not seem to get an advantage and did not get an advantage.'
The Botin influence over Santander is intriguing given the family owns just 1.3 per cent of the shares. She says this reflects the fact the 'family always thought about shareholders, what's best for the business'. About a third of Santander shareholders are Spanish retail investors.
Botin wants to be judged by her performance and says that the family connection helps give a long-term outlook. While trying to meet the market's demands for quarterly results, she also tries to focus 'on building a company that's going to be around, I tell my team, for the next 100 years'.
This family tradition could be coming to an end. While her brother, Javier, sits on the board, none of her three sons seems to be waiting in the wings. Would she want them to? 'I don't think they want to be in the business. The question is: what are they going to do down the road, does it make sense for them to have some relationship or not? I mean that's not something we're going to decide now.'
Returning to the UK, she acknowledges approaches were made for the British arm: 'We sit down, sometimes we listen. It's our fiduciary responsibility to listen to potentially interesting offers, but the UK was never for sale.'
The UK is a 'core' business to Santander, if not as profitable as others, because its stability provides a ballast for more volatile divisions in places such as Mexico and Argentina. It is not just because she 'loves the UK', where she keeps a home.
Britain, she says, is an 'innovative country' and one that, under Labour, has acknowledged that the post-2008 regulatory clampdown can hold back growth. 'The UK has already turned a corner and is going to be in a much more balanced place that allows you to balance a very safe financial system with higher growth,' she says.
In a week when the financial markets were rocked by the sight of Rachel Reeves crying in front of MPs, is she worried about potential instability? 'Everything is relative: look at the United States. The world is complicated, it's volatile. We're accustomed to volatility but relative to the rest of the world, the UK is probably one of the most stable and strong in terms of institutions — the central bank, the rule of law,' she says.
A few months away from her 65th birthday, Botin has no intention of slowing down, keeping a rigorous exercise regime of weights and cardio each morning and watching her food intake, skipping dinner a few nights a week. Still, time now for that margarita.