Increasingly, Santander is leveraging global scale by focusing on and investing in global businesses – including those in retail banking. Latin America has been central to these efforts and it has seen the benefit.
It was a pivotal year for Gravity, the bank’s in-house core banking cloud technology enabling post-mainframe migration. Starting with Chile, the bank then integrated Gravity in Mexico in 2025, before moving onto Brazil in 2026. This has put Santander in a fundamentally better position as a retail bank in Latin America.
Mexico is a good example of how technological transformation and an early move to the cloud has helped it increase its deposit base ahead of the market, without additional costs. The rollout of Gravity and OneApp in Mexico, including gen AI upgrades to its customer service, have led to above-market growth in profitability, and a rising net promoter score.
Moving to operate on the cloud has been a big shift, and we’ve also decreased the cost of our deposits in Mexico through a sophisticated smart pricing model
Alejandro Capote
“Moving to operate on the cloud has been a big shift, and we’ve also decreased the cost of our deposits in Mexico through a sophisticated smart pricing model,” says Alejandro Capote, head of retail and commercial for Santander Mexico.
“In Mexico, our commission-based fees are growing significantly; we’ve been growing above the market in products such as mortgages and auto, and the perception of the bank among our customers has also improved significantly.”
Digital growth engine
Simplifying products and digitalisation led to best-in-class efficiency and a customer base growing to 4.6 million in Chile, where it first developed a network of Work Cafés, now numbering 99 in the country. Similarly, in Argentina, digitalisation has been a growth engine for the firm, as it added more than 620,000 new digital customers in the country, reaching a total of 5.2 million individual customers.
Front-end design has also been a factor in new business and deposit inflows in Brazil, where the roll out of a new global app preceded launches later in 2025 in Mexico, Chile and then elsewhere.
It has also reaped the benefit of rebalancing its Brazilian business away from riskier consumer credit partly thanks to reinvigorated products, notably credit cards – refining segment thresholds, and updating the offering, notably around rewards.
“We’ve grown heavily in higher income segments, which was a target in Brazil,” says Eduardo Alvarez Garrido, strategy and chief data and artificial intelligence officer at Santander in Brazil. “We’ve gained market share in cards, which in Brazil is a transactional product: if you are doing well in cards, your clients are using your bank.”
