The prophesised ongoing dominance of the Spanish football team after its World Cup triumph this week is being cleverly mirrored by Spanish financial giant Santander – at least in the UK.

The group, which recently acquired three British high street banking icons and is now vying for more than 300 branches of the fiscally inhibited Royal Bank of Scotland, is making an aggressive push to attract the hard earned savings of consumers and expand in a tough but sizeable market.

Santander has done its homework on retail customer behaviour – it has established that people do not go to the trouble of switching banks for small benefits.

With the banks still fiercely battling for savings to help facilitate lending, and with one of the Spanish-giant’s major competitors, the Halifax, already dishing out £5 a month to customers who have their salary paid into an account, the bank has opted dangled a bigger carrot.

The group is offering £100 to switch and an attractive 5% interest up to a certain level of deposits in order to shake people into sitting up and paying attention.

Santander, which bought Abbey National in 2004 and later added the Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley after they fell on hard times, is looking for greater scale in a key market and at a time when otherwise impenetrable businesses are struggling.

Traditionally the bank has grown through aggressive acquisition in developing markets, mainly in Central and South America, but now finds itself holding significant assets and seeking to acquire more in a major developed market, both from customers and other banks – in RBS’s case, its actual distribution.

This week Santander also found time to extend its footprint across continental Europe with the acquisition of Sweden’s SEB banking division in Germany – a deal worth €555m (A$790m).

The deal doubles the size of Santander’s branch network in Germany by 173 new outlets, and adds an additional one million customers to its existing base.

Back in Britain, with so many big names under-performing after the credit crisis – Lloyds, TSB, Halifax and RBS, to name but a few – and akin to Italy, France and England’s respective performances at the 2010 World Cup, the opportunity for Santander is certainly there.

The challenge for both Spain’s football team and Santander is that with success and in becoming a major force, everybody else wants to take your place – the question is; how able and confident is Santander in reaching its Jabalani goals?