Santander Consumer Finance @ www.santanderconsumer.co.uk

Santander Consumer Finance has been operational since the summer of 2005. The Spanish banking giant itself has a rich history dating back to 1857. The financing departments headed through www.santanderconsumer.co.uk splits between Car, Caravan, Commercial Vehicle and Motorcycle. It is the Car category that we will be investigating here. Within this section there are a few options including Conditional Sale, Lease Purchase, Personal Contract Purchase and funding is also available through their Personal Loan choice. Through the Conditional Sale option (similar to HP), the term span is 12 to 60 months, their Lease product heads up to 48 and their PCP option is typically 25 or 37 months.

The Personal Loan choice grants sums of £1500 to £25,000 and the terms match those of the CS agreement (12/60). No direct applications can be put through www.santanderconsumer.co.uk with their service being available through their partners that they state is a built up network of over 3500. Their Lloyds Black Horse rival has over 5000. Santander Consumer Finance has a joint venture with the Hyundai Motor Group to create Hyundai Capital UK that issues the finance for Hyundai and Kia Motors. They also issue financing for Mazda and Volvo. A range of the companies that we have introduced also use them such as CarLoan4U, CarShop and Creditplus.

There is no complete account management facility, but customers can securely make payments, change their payment date and so on. They have took on an FLA membership place. Their customer support hours are listed on the site that covers Monday and Friday from 8am to 6.30pm and Saturday is 9am to 1.30pm. The pricing is not disclosed, but it is expected to be competitively set. For their loan they would likely offer the same charge as they do via www.santander.co.uk for the Santander unsecured personal loans. For a £10,000 loan over 48 months they would ask for £884.96 that would come in at 4.3% APR.