At a time when banking bosses from Wall Street to Canary Wharf are cracking down on working from home, the CEO of Santander UK remains an outlier.
While David Solomon of Goldman Sachs has described working from home as an “aberration” and Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan calls himself a “skeptic” of the trend that took off during the pandemic, Mike Regnier made working from home a requirement for the job in 2022 to assume. He says he would have turned down the Spanish lender if it had 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 is still working from home one to two days a week, and has been even more lenient towards Santander’s 19,000 UK staff, with office staff only expected to be on site two days a week will be.
“I don’t think it’s absolutely essential that people spend all five days a week in the office, as they did before the Covid-19 crisis,” says Regnier from his sixth-floor office near London’s Euston station. “And actually, without Covid, I wouldn’t have taken this job because I wouldn’t have wanted to be away from home in London five days a week. That would not have been good for the family or for me.”
This has helped Regnier, who is paid £3.3 million to run Britain’s fifth-largest bank, earn a reputation as an “approachable” boss, according to a former colleague.
The 52-year-old’s approach reflects the time he lost with his own father, who, as an oil economist, would travel hours by train from Leatherhead in Surrey to London. “He was a great father. One of those people who works extremely hard and felt that this was the most important thing in life. So [he was] not absent, but I probably didn’t see as much of him as my children see of me now.
Regnier, a father of two teenagers, moved 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 consultancy, he found a senior job at Asda, before former colleagues at the Boston Consulting Group convinced him to switch sectors and join a fast-growing and – at the time – successful bank in Halifax. “So I started working at HBOS in 2006. What could go wrong?”
It went spectacularly wrong. The then bosses of Halifax Bank of Scotland – who regulators said had encouraged a culture of growth at all costs – accrued £45bn of bad debts that required a £20bn taxpayer bailout after a emergency takeover by Lloyds TSB in 2008.
The change under Lloyds was palpable, says Regnier, with then-CEO Eric Daniels leading a “more measured culture” in which power was not tightly held at the top.
“The biggest thing I learned from that time was the importance of a good culture in the banking industry,” says Regnier.
He then joined a demerged TSB – which Lloyds had been forced to give up in exchange for state aid during the financial crisis – but he looked for a way out. “That would be another few years of integration hell” as TSB tried to break away from Lloyds’ IT platform, he says.
So when he was asked to join the Yorkshire Building Society, where he was told he would have a chance to become CEO, he jumped at the chance.
But Regnier never intended to go into the financial services industry, and originally wanted to follow in the footsteps of his paternal grandfather, Carlos Regnier: an engineer known for designing his own two-seater airplane that, according to his grandson, “looked remarkably similar” on the Spitfire which launched a few years later.
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However, Regnier’s father told him that “in Britain the accountants run the industry”, which led to him gaining a combined degree in engineering, economics and management from Oxford. That was later followed by a masters in business at France’s Insead, where he met other future City figures including Prudential Regulation Authority 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 served in the role for five years, between 2017 and 2021.
Although he loved working for a client lender, he felt isolated. “In a publicly traded company you have investors who are constantly telling you what they want you to do, and constantly telling you where you are falling short. And those kinds of external stimuli are very useful. You don’t have that in a housing association; you have to find it yourself.”
He certainly found external motivation when he joined Banco Santander, led by “formidable” executive chairman Ana Botín. As well as chasing strong UK profits to please his bosses, he also has to compete for capital against the group’s other international operations in countries such as Brazil and Mexico.
That has put Britain’s regulatory environment and the country’s competitiveness front and center, prompting Regnier to call for major changes from both Conservative and Labor leaders that could help create new financing options for his bank after the election.
“The most important thing I would urge any government to do is to take bold policy steps that make sense. And then they have to be financed. We must find a way to support these promises, but especially the green transition. Decisions are needed, and then money is needed.”
CV
Age 52
Family Married with two teenage children.
Education Engineering, Economics and Management degree from Oxford; MBA at Insead.
Last holiday ‘A long weekend on the coast near Middlesbrough watching my son play cricket.’
Pay £3.3 million by 2023.
The best advice he’s received “Start with a ‘why’.”
Biggest career mistake “Not gaining more international experience.”
Word he uses too much “Why…! Although I would argue that I use it a lot, rather than overusing it.
How he relaxes Family, friends and sports.