New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Santander Bank continues downsizing in Connecticut, closing two branches
Boston-based Santander Bank plans to close branches in Hartford and Manchester in April, company officials confirmed this week.
The Manchester branch at 525 West Middle Turnpike will close on April 20, according to a spokesman for the bank, while the Santander location at 115 Asylum Street in Hartford will close on April 27. The branches are being consolidated with Santander locations on Ellington Road in South Windsor and on Franklin Avenue in Hartford’s South End.
The closings will leave Santander Bank with 15 locations in Connecticut, the spokesman said. As recently as 2021, the bank had 28 branches in the state before closing four branches in August of that year.
“Like many industries, our customers’ preferences have changed, with more customers choosing to bank with us online,” bank officials said in a statement explaining the latest branch closures. “Therefore, we are reimagining the customer and employee experience by simplifying our processes, refining our branch footprint, and increasing our investment in digital capabilities to align with the evolving needs of our customers.”
The bulk of Santander’s Connecticut branch presence is in Hartford’s suburbs. The bank has only two branches in New Haven County, in Waterbury and New Haven’s Fair Haven neighborhood and does not have a single branch in Fairfield County, which is arguably Connecticut’s most attractive banking market.
Santander Bank is the U.S. subsidiary of Spanish financial services giant Banco Santander. The bank broke into the Connecticut market when it acquired Pennsylvaniabased Sovereign Bank in 2009.
Sovereign had bolstered its Connecticut presence in 1999 when it acquired 278 Fleet and BankBoston branches, including some in Connecticut that those two banks had to sell off to satisfy anti-trust concerns as a result of their merger. The Sovereign branches took on the Santander name in 2013.
Santander has 483 branches is nine states, with the bank’s Connecticut presence being the sixth largest in the chain, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
The Connecticut banking industry has seen the pace of branch closings that started a decade ago quicken as a result of mergers and changes in the way consumers do their banking.
Between June 2020 and June 2022, the number of bank branches in Connecticut decreased by 82, according to FDIC data and analysis by John Carusone, president of the Bank Analysis Center, a Hartford-based industry consulting firm. That represents a 7.5 percent decrease in the number of bank branches during that period.
Carusone said because of Connecticut’s location between New York City and Santander’s Boston headquarters, the bank can’t really afford to shrink its presence in this state much further. That’s especially true with Santander’s urban branches in Connecticut, he said, because regulators watch those locations carefully to determine whether banks are adequately serving lowand-moderate income customers.
“Connecticut is still an important destination for banks, even though the state is seeing slower growth,” Carusone said. “The conventional wisdom 10 years ago was that the state had too many banks and was overbranched. While the former may still be true, you can’t say that about the number of branches.”
The number of financial institutions in the state — which covers commercial banks, savings banks and savings & loans — has remained essentially flat over the period from June 2020 to June 2022. There were 56 financial institutions in June 2020 and 54 in June 2022.