‘It’s not vital to spend five days a week in the office’: the bank boss who works from home

Mike Regnier has lived in Harrogate since the early 2000s after he and his wife decided they did not want to bring up children in London. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

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.