Over 2023, Santander recruited over 4,500 professionals with digital skills to aid the group’s transformation.

The growing demand for these types of employees led to Santander launching a targeted recruitment strategy under the Be Tech! with Santander programme.

Thanks to the initiative, the bank now holds 27,500 STEM professionals in its 10 core markets across Europe and the Americas.

In addition, the main goal on the initiative was to attract and retain technology talent to support the bank’s vision in becoming the best open financial services platform and also accelerate its digital transformation.

Furthermore, it is still looking for another 400 professionals across Spain, Brazil, Mexico, the UK and the US.

The bank hopes to have moved the majority of its core banking platform over to the Gravity platform by end-2024. So far, it has moved all of its UK business clients, consumer clients in Chile and the Santander CIB arm without any service interruption.

Once migration is complete, the Gravity platform will be able to manage more than a billion technical operations per year.

In September 2023, Santander contributed €67m ($71m) as part of a €100m fund for start-ups with Inveready Asset Management.

The start-ups fund from Santander and Inveready will be Spain’s biggest venture debt fund. It will be aimed at capital-efficient tech and high growth enterprises that have already been through at least one round of financial and can reach a certain profit in the medium term.

Financing will range from €500,000 to €5m euros for flexible funding.