Keith Moor, Chief Marketing Officer, Santander UK, explains why he believes the new Santander Cycles scheme is good for Santander and for London.
Everything we do is built around being Simple, Personal, Fair. That’s the Santander Way, and it is an approach we’ve been adopting over the last two years as we’ve sought to improve our customers’ banking experience.
The introduction of our 123 World products, and the associated cashback scheme, has proved popular and delivered great value for almost 4 million new customers. We’ve made great progress but we know we can do even better.
To truly help people and businesses prosper, we need to find other ways to make thing simple, personal and fair for them, not just when they’re managing their money. We want to get out into our communities and show everyone that Santander can help make the things they really care about simple, personal and fair too.
TfL’s vision to help more people live more positively by providing an easy, enjoyable and accessible way of travelling, chimed with our own promise and so the desire to bring the Santander Cycle scheme to life was borne.
Our successful bid is, therefore, based on more than simply money. Yes, we are making a good contribution over the next seven years to the running of the scheme, but more importantly, we’ve committed an additional £1m a year to promote and improve Santander Cycles.
It is through this additional money where I believe we will add significant value to TfL’s efforts. And it will go beyond simply adding more bikes and new docking stations.
We want to make the whole experience of using Santander Cycles as simple, personal and fair as possible. We want to improve how people find out about the scheme, how they pay for and use the bikes, and how they make the most of the experience and their city once they’re on their journey.
And we want to get as many people involved as possible, by making the whole experience as easy as ‘1|2|3 Go’.
Our partnership with TfL runs for 7 years so we have plenty of opportunity to demonstrate simple, personal and fair in action. Whilst we are just at the beginning of this journey, we already have some exciting ideas:
- We’ll work with TfL to develop a world-first Cycles app which will allow people to control the whole experience from the palm of their hand.
- We’ll make sure that our 1I2I3 Credit Card customers using Santander Cycles will be able to earn 3% cash back on the cost of their journeys.
- We’ll make our branches a centrepiece of the scheme with ‘cycle champions’ in each London branch who’ll be trained to help people get involved.
- We’ll get more people engaged by running Festivals of Cycling all over the capital where families and friends can get together for a great day out in a safe place full of entertaining experiences.
- We’ll look at ways to have our staff further involved through reviewing Cycle to Work schemes, a corporate account with TfL for Santander Cycles usage and our CSR activities across the bank.
- We’ll champion the businesses we have relationships with to make them part of the experience for cyclists across the city and the scheme itself.
The roll out of the red bikes is starting now. It will be July before we see this concluding and from then on, you can expect to see Santander Cycles matching London’s buses, phone kiosks and post boxes as one of the Capital’s red icons.
We’re excited by the possibilities. We hope people will be too.
