With a single keystroke, Marisa Pozuelo, a 34- year-old Spanish bank manager, pulled up a client’s financial details on her laptop. It was last Wednesday morning and she had just briefed her seven-strong team on the day’s targets and other information that had filtered down from head office.

A quick scroll down the page and she was able to see the products that customer had bought, the credit rating and how profitable she was to the bank. Welcome to the high-tech age of banking. Pozuelo, an employee of Banco Santander Central Hispano — the Spanish bank that has made a recommended £8.5 billion bid for Britain’s Abbey National — is at the cutting edge.

Pozuelo runs a branch under the Banesto banner — 89% owned by Santander — off one of Madrid’s most fashionable shopping streets. The technology shows exactly the last time the customer came in and it measures his or her loyalty. It identifies new services that can be sold from a basket of 17 products, as well as detecting early signs that he or she may be taking business elsewhere. The manager is also given the discretion to be flexible on product charges for each client.

Just a few kilometres away Margarita Martinez is doing the same job at a Santander Central Hispano branch. Her office is slightly bigger, she manages 20 staff and, as in Pozuelo’s branch, each of her staff has a defined job — from managing small firms to private banking for big- hitting clients with more than €600,000 (£407,000) of liquid assets.

When she was just 23 Martinez became Santander’s youngest branch manager and she has since managed a series of outlets. She said her current branch produced a ¤6m annual income for the bank.

If the Spaniards have their way, this aggressive sales approach could soon be adopted in Britain. That prospect became more real last week when HBOS said it would not make a rival bid for Abbey. The announcement led to a 6% fall in Abbey’s share price, which closed the week at 571p. Unless another bidder emerges — and most analysts now believe this to be highly unlikely — Abbey will fall into Spanish hands before Christmas and mark Europe’s biggest cross-border banking deal.

While a lot of the technology used by Santander has also been embraced by Britain’s top retail banks, there are many, including Abbey, that are still encumbered with legacy systems and as a result have become uncompetitive.

Emilio Botin, Santander’s 69-year-old chairman, believes when his IT infrastructure is installed it will give Abbey the edge to take on the Big Four and justify his acquisition of Britain’s sixth-biggest bank. There are virtually no back- office functions at Santander’s Spanish branches and all the data are fed back into a processing centre. The bank works out how many employees should be in the bank according to the volume of business. If performance targets are not hit, questions are quickly asked by regional managers.

Abbey customers may not know it yet, but Santander is determined to make an impression on retail banking in Britain. Botin has a history of challenging the status quo, but some analysts believe he may find the competitive UK market tough to crack. One said: “This is not the case of a first-world bank taking over a third-world one. Santander has been spinning a bit of a story about its technology, and in my view it does not have a magic bullet. It’s going to be a long grind.”

ON Tuesday morning Luqman Arnold, Abbey’s chief executive, was having breakfast in London’s Savoy hotel. At that stage, he remained confident HBOS would make an approach and the bid would be referred to the Competition Commission. The company was even in the process of working on bonus payments to encourage staff to stay throughout a competition inquiry.

But instead of the prospect of an auction, Abbey’s 25,000 staff and its thousands of investors who will own Santander shares are now starting to examine what the Spanish can do to rescue a tired and under- invested brand.

Abbey is a significant deal for Santander. When Abbey is folded into the enlarged company it will account for 24% of its €17.3 billion income and 21% of operating profits of €7.2 billion. It will also push it into the bottom rung of the league of the top 10 global banks.

At a presentation last Wednesday Botin set an ambitious target of achieving cost savings of €450m within three years. To hit this it will have to set aside €680m as a one-off restructuring charge.