PROVIDENCE – Santander Bank has laid off roughly 200 employees the bank told Providence Business News on Wednesday.
The round of layoffs included 20 in Rhode Island.
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The layoffs were roughly evenly split between consumer-banking and business-banking employees, including front-end and back-end workers, said Pierre Habis, Santander’s head of consumer and business banking.
The bank’s footprint spans nine states, including Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The layoffs in Rhode Island are due to the bank’s changes to business banking.
Habis started in his role in May. He said that the layoffs reflect a reshuffling of resources that will allow the bank’s business team to be closer to consumers.
Previously, the business-banking team, which works with small businesses, were not necessarily located in bank branches and were operating as a separate group from the company’s branch employees, Habis said.
“When you went into a branch, you wouldn’t necessarily meet your business-relation manager then. They would be in some other office or [on] some other floor,” Habis said. “So we wanted to evolve the model more, we wanted to be where our business customers were, or where they were asking for us, at least.”
Habis said that this setup, particularly in the time when companies were filing for federal Paycheck Protection Program funding, slowed down small businesses’ interactions with the bank, as they came to branches and then would have to call in to the bank’s business banking team elsewhere. When a small business client would go to a branch to talk to a business manager or open n account, “we would add this extra step of brining or calling another group, setting up an appointment, now you come right in and our team is going to be there,” Habis said.
“One of the things I am charged with is how to get closer to our customers, and this is one step in the operating model to get closer,” Habis said.
“We want to do more small-business activities as we continue to grow, but it makes the most sense to me to be where our customers walk in and ask for us, versus somewhere else.”
Santander Bank has roughly 10,000 employees in the U.S.
“This is a time to be even more committed to small business and being there for them when they walk in and to bring the thousands of staff that we have in our branches to be now even more focused on small businesses, not just the personal side of things,” Habis said.
Chris Bergenheim is the PBN web editor. You may reach him at Bergenheim@PBN.com.
