‘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.

After an early career in consulting, he found a senior job with Asda, before former Boston Consulting Group colleagues convinced him to switch sectors and join a fast-growing and - at the time - successful bank in Halifax. "So I went to go and work in 2006 for HBOS. What could possibly go wrong?"

It went spectacularly wrong. Halifax Bank of Scotland's bosses at the time - who regulators said had driven a culture of growth at all costs - accumulated £45bn in bad debts that required a £20bn taxpayer bailout after an emergency takeover by Lloyds TSB in 2008.

The change under Lloyds was palpable, Regnier says, with its then chief executive Eric Daniels running a "more measured culture" where power was not held tightly at the very top.

"The biggest thing I learned from that time was the importance of good culture in the banking sector," Regnier says.

He then went on to join a spun-out TSB - which Lloyds had had to give up in exchange for taking state aid during the financial crisis - but was looking for an out. "That was going to be another couple of years of integration hell", as TSB tried to extricate itself from Lloyds' IT platform, he says.

So when he was asked to join Yorkshire building society, where he was told he would have a shot at becoming chief executive, he leapt at the chance.

But Regnier never intended to go into financial services, and originally wanted to follow in the footsteps of his paternal grandfather, Carlos Regnier: an engineer notable for designing his own two-seat plane that his grandson says was "remarkably similar" to the Spitfire that launched a few years later.

However, Regnier's father told him that "in the UK, it's accountants who run industry", resulting in him taking a combined engineering, economics and management degree at Oxford. That was later followed by a master's in business at France's Insead, where he met other future City figures including the Prudential Regulation Authority's chief executive, Sam Woods.

That route served him well, and after three years as chief commercial and then chief customer officer, he was appointed chief executive of Yorkshire building society, where he held the role for five years, between 2017 and 2021.

While he loved working for a customer-owned lender, he felt isolated. "In a listed company, you've got investors who are constantly telling you what they want you to do, and constantly telling you where you're falling short. And that kind of external stimulus is very useful. You don't have that in a building society; you have to find it yourself."

He certainly found external motivation once he joined Banco Santander, run by its "formidable" executive chair Ana Botin. Not only does he have to chase strong UK profits to appease his bosses, but must compete for capital against the group's other international operations in countries such as Brazil and Mexico.

That has put UK regulation and the country's competitiveness front of mind, pushing Regnier to call for big changes from both Conservative and Labour leaders, which could help open up new funding opportunities for his bank post-election.

"The really important thing I would urge any government to do is to make bold policy moves that make sense. And then those need to be funded. We need to find a way of standing behind those commitments, but particularly the green transition. Decisions are needed, and then money's needed."