Santander Work Café has free assembly rooms – HELEN KIRRANE visits and asks: Can espresso save financial institution branches?

High Street Kensington has a new coffee shop. That’s a line that can be replicated across the country, as cafés are a rare area of the high street still booming, alongside charity shops, bookies and barbers.

But what’s different about this one is that it’s a bank branch with a café attached… or should that be a café with bank branch attached?

Either way, Santander has launched its Work Café concept in London and I hot-footed it down there to see what it’s like and ask: can coffee help revive bank branches, of which numbers are down 64 per cent in 10 years?

Santander has launched three other such cafes – in Leeds, Milton Keynes and Euston – with another launching near London’s Cheapside soon, bringing the total to five.

The Kensington branch is bustling when I get in on a Thursday at 2.30pm. I count 15 people dotted around the work space, which opened its doors on Monday.

There are five branch staff members on hand and two baristas manning the café.

Cafe or bank branch?: The Santander Work Cafe opened its doors this week in High Street Kensington. It offers free work spaces as well as, you guessed it, coffee

I’m greeted by one of the branch staff members as soon as I walk in, and she gives me a tour and explains how the work café concept works.

Anyone can drop in for a coffee, you don’t have to be a Santander customer – it has a work space which consists of workbench-style tables with charging points and there are three bookable meeting rooms.

The work space can also be booked for events, while the meeting rooms can accommodate up to eight people and can be booked for blocks of two hours, all for free.

Some customers are using the ATMs, others are getting help from branch staff with meatier banking questions – one lady wants to change her name on her bank account – and generally many people are perched around tables chatting.

I beeline to the counter for my original quest: to grab a coffee – but I am staggered by the prices.

A flat white, my go-to order, set me back £4.50. Add on a slice of banana bread for an eyewatering £6.50 and I am £11 worse off by the time I leave the counter.

Had I paid with a Santander debit card however (my Santander easy-access savings didn’t cut it for a discount) I would have received 30 per cent off and parted with a far more palatable £7.70.

You can get a flat white in Joe and the Juice across the road for £4.10 while Gails – the very epitome of middle-class coffee culture – charges £3.90 for a flat white. 

A flat white in upmarket supermarket Wholefoods down the road costs £3.29. If you want to avoid high street prices altogether McDonalds just a few doors down charges £1.99, so Santander’s coffees are pricier than all of these…. unless you have a Santander debit card.

This would bring the flat white price down to a far more reasonable £3.15. For me, that shows this is tailored to their customers, as it should be really. 

The pay off for the high prices for non-customers is that Santander is offering work spaces, an event space and bookable meeting rooms for free, alongside all its usual bank branch facilities. 

The cost of all this is presumably baked into the price of a £6.50 slice of banana bread.

A similar set up in a co-working space can cost £20 a day up to £600 a month depending on where the workspace is and the plan you get. 

It’s not the place to come if you have half an hour to kill and want a coffee while you wait, as you’ll end up paying more than anywhere else on the high street, unless you’re a Santander current account holder.

But if you do need a place to hold a presentation or take meetings for a few hours, it’s completely free.

The cafés are open from 8:30am until 4:30pm Monday to Friday and the Kensington Work Café has branch counter service on Saturdays between 9:30am until 12:30pm.

The reception so far seems to be positive, I overhear a lady telling staff as she leaves the Kensington branch: ‘It’s so nice in here I love it’, admittedly I don’t know how much she paid for her coffee.

While a new Google review says: ‘Absolutely incredible … I really hope this takes off. Free meeting rooms and workspaces. Highly recommend. Great people.’

The concept has been around for a while outside of Britain – it originated in Santander Chile in 2016 and has proved incredibly popular, according to the bank. 

It’s now been adopted across much of the group, including in Spain, Mexico, Poland and Argentina. 

Will it take-off in Britain? It think it has a good chance… and it least a major bank is trying something innovative on the high street, even if that does once again involve caffine.