TSB’s CIO has left the bank and will hand over duties to Santander’s UK equivalent as part of a reshuffle as the UK high street bank integrates with its acquirer. As well as CIO Cheryl McCuaig, the bank has cut the chief risk officer, chief people officer and communications and corporate affairs director positions.
McCuaig started her career at HSBC, and has held senior executive roles at JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group and Metro Bank
Nicola Bannister, TSB CEO, said: “[The executives] played crucial roles in the [executive committee] in recent years, helping to deliver record TSB performances and putting us in the strongest possible position ahead of integration with Santander.”
The bank said: “Orderly handovers are underway with TSB leaders and Santander UK executives in these functions.”
Santander UK completed its £2.65bn acquisition, first mooted in July 2025, of TSB from fellow Spanish bank Sabadell in April this year.
In the latest announcement, TSB said it is “preparing for further integration with Santander UK through a Part VII banking transfer process and is preparing to begin transferring some employees to its parent bank from the beginning of October, with the rest of the business envisaged to follow in early 2027”.
When the acquisition first surfaced, Santander said it planned to integrate TSB into Santander UK. Although the bank said no decisions have been made, this would certainly involve the migration of the TSB customer base to Santander’s Partenon core banking system and could see the disappearance of the TSB name.
In a statement at the time, Santander said: “By integrating technology across Santander UK and TSB, Santander expects to unlock substantial operational efficiencies and support long-term profitability through a simplified, scalable digital banking model.”
In the UK, Santander acquired Abbey in 2004, and Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley in 2008. The bank’s strategy to migrate acquired customers to its Partenon core banking platform gains huge advantages by standardising operations and creating a single view of customers.
Core system migrations at banks are hugely risky, but Santander’s track record of integrating acquisitions onto the Partenon platform could ensure it avoids the disaster that struck TSB customers in 2018, when the latter migrated from Lloyds Bank systems, which hosted it, to a UK version of Sabadell’s in-house-developed core system, known as Proteo4UK.
In April 2018, the migration experienced major problems. Over a five-day period, users were locked out, experienced money disappearing and some were even able to see other customers’ accounts.
All of TSB’s branches and a significant proportion of its 5.2 million customers were affected by the initial issues. Some customers continued to be affected by issues, and it took until December 2018 for TSB to return to business as usual.
The UK regulator fined TSB nearly £50m for its failures, and the bank paid £32.7m in redress to customers who suffered detriment.
It also fined TSB’s former CIO, Carlos Abarca, £81,620 for his part in the catastrophic migration of the bank’s IT to a new system.
A Prudential Regulation Authority investigation found that Abarca breached the PRA’s Senior Manager Conduct Rule 2 because he failed to take reasonable steps to ensure that TSB complied with the PRA Outsourcing Rule.
