Latin America remains at the heart of Banco Santander’s strategy to build out global businesses. These businesses today include corporate and investment banking, payments, wealth management and, most recently, retail and commercial banking, coming off the back of the development of in-house global technology platforms. And in 2024, they have only gone from strength to strength.
With the rollout of new digital products and services, and the move to migrate to the new global platforms, Santander is taking the fight to the neobanks. At the same time, it is taking its businesses in areas like wholesale banking and auto finance to the next level of scale, customer service and profitability: leveraging a growing corporate and investment banking franchise in New York, sealing new auto partnerships across the region, and much more.
In wealth management, it further developed its investment and distribution capabilities, including closer integration with the Toro platform, helping a sharp rise in customer inflows. In payments, it expanded its Getnet merchant acquiring business, and started to implement Plard, its cards platform, in Brazil and Chile.
The group chose Chile to be an early mover as it started to transfer legacy mainframe systems to Gravity, the new global core banking platform. Gravity went live in Chile in early 2025, with Brazil and Mexico soon to follow.
Meanwhile, in Brazil, one signal of the bank’s direction was a new digital current account and no-fee card with the unique addition of a 10-day interest-free overdraft. This comes after a similar product launch in Chile in 2023, called Más Lucas. Chile followed that launch in 2024 with a similar account for teenagers.
“With a new value proposition for individuals, and a repositioning of our SME business both online and in the physical network, in 2024 Santander Brasil delivered several key projects,” says Eduardo Alvarez Garrido, strategy and chief data and artificial intelligence officer for Brazil.
Higher business volumes, lower deposit costs, as well as efficiency improvements and growth in fee income, all helped the good results on the continent
“Not only have our results gained momentum, but we’ve also implemented a series of new, differentiated value offerings for our Brazilian customers.”
For South America as a whole, the bank reported a 36% year-on-year increase in attributable profit in 2024, driven by exceptionally good performances in Brazil and Argentina. Higher business volumes, lower deposit costs, as well as efficiency improvements and growth in fee income, all helped the good results on the continent.
In Mexico, meanwhile, it is moving in a similar direction, with plans for a step-change in growth in the country thanks to a planned $2 billion investment over the coming two years.
Among Santander’s bigger projects in Mexico in 2024 was preparation for the local launch of Openbank, its cloud-native digital-only bank through which it has developed the front-end technology platform it is now rolling out across the group. Those preparations came good with an Openbank launch in Mexico in early 2025 – offering a full-service, fee-free digital bank – following an Openbank launch in the US a few months earlier.
“Mexico is a key market for Santander and that is why we are continuing to invest, at the same time as transforming our bank – becoming a digital bank with branches,” says Alejandro Capote Garza, deputy general director for retail and commercial banking at Santander Mexico.
