The bank manager who works at home says it’s not essential to work five days per week.

Santander UK’s chief executive is an outlier at a time when bank bosses have tightened up on the working from home.

Mike Regnier, who made home-working a condition for taking the job at JP Morgan in 2022, is a similar person to Jamie Dimon, who called home-working an “aberration”. He claims he would not have accepted the job if the Spanish-owned bank had refused to allow him to work from home, in Harrogate, Yorkshire where he’s lived since early 2000s.

Regnier, two years after assuming the reins of Santander, still works one to two days per week from home. He has also been more lenient towards Santander’s 19,000 UK employees, who are only required to work in their offices two days a weekly.

Regnier, who works in a sixth-floor London office near Euston Station, says: “I do not think it is absolutely necessary that people spend five days in the office like they used to before Covid.” “I would not have accepted the job if it wasn’t for Covid. I didn’t want to spend five days away from my family in London. This would not have been good for my family or me.”

According to a former co-worker, Regnier’s reputation as a “approachable boss” has been enhanced by his being paid £3.3m for running the UK’s 5th largest bank.

The 52-year old’s approach is a reflection of the time he spent with his father who, as a oil economist, used to spend hours travelling by train from Leatherhead, Surrey, to London. “He was a wonderful father. He was one of those people that were extremely hard-working, and thought it was important to work. “I didn’t miss him, but my children probably saw more of me than I did of [him].

Regnier, father of two teens, moved to Yorkshire in the early 1990s after he decided that he and wife did not want to raise their children in London.

He began his career as a consultant, but was soon offered a job at Asda. His former Boston Consulting Group co-workers convinced him to change sectors and join Halifax’s fast-growing, successful bank. “I went to work for HBOS in 2006. What could possibly go awry?

It was a spectacular failure. Halifax Bank of Scotland bosses – who were deemed by regulators to have fostered a culture of “growth at any cost ” – accumulated £45bn of bad debts, which required a PS20bn bailout from the taxpayer after an emergency Lloyds TSB takeover in 2008.

Regnier says that the change at Lloyds was palpable. Its then-chief executive Eric Daniels ran a “more balanced culture” in which power was not tightly held at the top.

Regnier says, “The most important thing I learned was the importance for good culture in banking.”

He joined a newly spun-off TSB – which Lloyds was forced to give up as a condition of accepting state aid in the financial crisis – but he was still looking for a way out. He says that TSB’s attempt to separate itself from Lloyds IT platform would have meant “another couple of years integration hell”.

When he heard that he could become chief executive of the Yorkshire Building Society, he jumped at the opportunity.

Regnier had never intended to enter the financial services industry. He wanted to follow the path of his grandfather, Carlos Regnier, an engineer who designed his own two-seater plane, which his grandson said was “remarkably similar”, to the Spitfire launched a few decades later.

Regnier’s dad told him, however, that “in Britain, accountants run the industry”. This led him to take a combined degree in engineering, economics, and management at Oxford. Later, he completed a masters in business from France’s Insead where he met future City figures, including Sam Woods, the Prudential Regulatory Authority’s Chief Executive.

After three years in the roles of chief commercial officer and chief customer officer, he became chief executive at Yorkshire Building Society, where he served for five years between 2017 and 2021.

He loved working at a lender owned by customers, but he also felt lonely. In a publicly traded company, investors are always telling you what you should do and where you fall short. This kind of external stimulation is extremely useful. “You can’t find that in a construction society. You have to do it yourself.”

After joining Banco Santander and its “formidable executive chair Ana Botin, he found a new source of motivation. He must not only chase UK profits in order to please his bosses but also compete with the other international operations of the group, such as Brazil and Mexico.

Regnier has been pushed to make big demands of both the Conservative and Labour leaderships, in order to open up funding opportunities for his Bank after the election.

“I would encourage any government to take bold, sensible policy decisions. Then, these initiatives need to be financed. We must find a solution to stand behind these commitments and in particular the green transition. “Decisions are required, then money is needed.”