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Britain's fifth-biggest bank will this week pave the way for a change of chief executive by raiding Nationwide to hire one of its top managers.

Sky News has learnt that Tony Prestedge, who has worked for the UK's largest building society for more than a decade, is to be named deputy chief executive of Santander UK.

An announcement is expected to be made to the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday morning.

Mr Prestedge, who is Nationwide's chief relationships and distribution officer, will become the clear frontrunner to replace Nathan Bostock, Santander UK's current chief executive, during the course of 2021, according to an insider.

The succession plan at the Spanish-owned lender comes as it also seeks a new chairman to replace Baroness Vadera, the former Labour minister.

Baroness Vadera is to leave Santander UK this year to chair Prudential, the FTSE-100 insurer which is this week expected to accede to calls from an activist investor by unveiling a partial break-up.

The leadership changes at the top of Santander UK come months after it announced a 37% slump in pre-tax profit for 2019.

The bank, which has more than 14m UK customers, built its presence in Britain through a string of acquisitions, including Abbey, and then - during the 2008-09 financial crisis - parts of Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley.

Its performance has been patchy in recent years, partly because, like its high street rivals, it has been grappling with ultra-low interest rates and outdated IT systems and branch networks.

Santander UK employs more than 23,000 people, making it about one-third larger than Nationwide's headcount.

Mr Bostock, who has run the UK business since 2014, is tipped to move to a role elsewhere in the Spanish bank's international operations when he vacates the UK post.

A source close to the Spanish-owned lender insisted that there were a number of potential internal successors to the current CEO.

The recruitment of Mr Prestedge comes at a tumultuous time in the executive ranks of the UK's biggest lenders.

At Barclays, CEO Jes Staley is being investigated by regulators for the second time in three years - this time over the "characterisation" to his employer and watchdogs of his relationship with the disgraced late financier Jeffrey Epstein.

HSBC continues to hunt a replacement for John Flint, who was ousted last summer.

The state-backed Royal Bank of Scotland recently installed Alison Rose as its first female boss, with one of her first actions a plan to rename the company NatWest.

At Lloyds Banking Group, where Antonio Horta-Osorio has run the UK's biggest bank for nearly a decade, a change of leadership is expected in the next couple of years.

Lloyds is also searching for a new chairman.

In addition to the dominant five high street banks, which account for the overwhelming majority of UK mortgage lending and consumer and business banking, a number of digital competitors have begun to take market share from them.

Later this year, JPMorgan, the world's largest bank by market capitalisation, plans to launch a digital consumer bank in the UK, Sky News revealed recently.

Nationwide and Santander UK both declined to comment on Monday evening.