SANTANDER has confirmed that its Northern Ireland branches are safe from its latest cull of 111 premises.
The banking giant also announced on Thursday that it will consolidate its office sites into six main locations across the UK as part of a shift to more flexible working.
Belfast will become one of the six bases, with £150m set to be spent on a new headquarters in Milton Keynes.
While it has escaped the latest cut, Santander’s Northern Ireland operation lost seven branches over 2018 and 2019, most of them in Belfast and Co Antrim.
The lender currently has 21 branches in the north, more than AIB. By the end of this year, its branch network here will also outnumber Bank of Ireland.
The branches marked for closure in Britain will go by the end of August 2021.
Santander said the closures reflect the ongoing shift by customers towards mobile and online banking.
Bank of Ireland confirmed on March 1 that it will reduce its branch network in the north from 28 to 13 by the end of this year.
It will take the combined branch total for the traditional ‘big four’ Northern Ireland banks to 82, down from around 300 at the turn of the millennium.
Santander said the digital trend has been accelerated by the pandemic, although branch transactions fell by a third over the two years before the virus crisis and declined by a further 50 per cent in 2020.
Mobile and online transactions have been growing by 20 per cent each year, with almost two thirds of transactions now digital.
Adam Bishop, head of branches at Santander, said: "Branch usage by customers has fallen considerably over recent years so we have made the difficult decision to consolidate our presence in areas where we have multiple branches relatively close together.
"We will provide every support to customers of closing branches to find alternative ways to bank with us that best suit their individual needs.
"We are also working alongside our unions to support colleagues through these changes and to find alternative roles for those impacted wherever possible.
"We continue to believe that branches have an important role to play and we expect the size of our network to remain stable for the foreseeable future."
The Communication Workers Union said it had reached a ground-breaking agreement with Santander on new ways of working which will preserve jobs and avoid compulsory redundancies that would otherwise have been "inevitable".
National officer Sally Bridge said: "Recent membership surveys have indicated a desire from a large majority of those currently working from home for flexibility to continue after the pandemic, and this agreement achieves that for the majority of employees affected by these changes.
"Ultimately, however, faced with the proposals of site closures and consolidations, the deal we've negotiated has avoided compulsory redundancies by giving individuals genuine options, crucially protecting our most vulnerable members for whom dual location arrangements were not suitable on account of their exceptional circumstances.
"Santander deserves credit for recognising its responsibilities to its employees and I hope other employers follow the moral lead the bank has taken in what is likely to be one of the first of many far-reaching corporate readjustments to the post-Covid world of work."
