‘It’s not vital to spend five days a week in the office’: the bank boss who works from home

At a time when ­banking bosses from Wall Street to Canary Wharf have been ­cracking down on working from home, Santander UK's chief executive remains an outlier.

While Goldman Sachs's David Solomon has described home working as an "aberration", and JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon calls himself a "skeptic" of the trend that took off during the pandemic, Mike Regnier made home working a condition of taking the job in 2022. He says he would have turned down the Spanish-owned lender had it refused to let him work from his family home in Harrogate, Yorkshire, where he has lived since the early 2000s.

Two years after taking the reins, Regnier still works from home one to two days a week, and has been even more lenient with Santander's 19,000 UK staff, with office-based workers only expected to be onsite two days a week.

"I don't think it's absolutely vital that people spend all five days a week in the office as they did pre-Covid," Regnier says from his sixth-floor office near Euston station in London. "And, actually, had it not been for Covid, I wouldn't have accepted this job, because I wouldn't have wanted to be away from home five days a week in London. That wouldn't have been good for the family or for me."

This has helped Regnier, who is paid £3.3m to run the UK's fifth-largest bank, gain a reputation as an "approachable" boss, according to a former colleague.

The 52-year-old's approach reflects time he lost with his own father, who, as an oil economist, would spend hours commuting by train to London from Leatherhead in Surrey. "He was an amazing father. One of those people who's extremely hard-working and felt that was the most important thing in life. So [he was] not absent, but I probably didn't see as much of him as my kids see of me now."

Regnier, a father of two teenagers, made the move to Yorkshire 20 years ago after he and his wife decided they did not want to raise children in London.