Banco Santander was authorized in 1857 to finance trade through the port of Santander in northern Spain. For more than a century it was a regional lender. The Botin family turned it into a national bank after 1950, and Emilio Botin, chairman from 1986 to 2014, made it multinational. His 1989 Supercuenta high-interest account set off a deposit price war in Spain, and the 1999 merger with Banco Central Hispano created the country's largest bank.
Building a multinational group
Santander expanded through acquisitions in markets where it could reach scale: Mexico, Brazil and Chile in the 1990s and 2000s, Abbey National in the UK in 2004, Banco Real in Brazil through the 2007 ABN AMRO break-up, and Sovereign in the US. In 2017 it bought the failing Banco Popular for one euro and raised about $7.91 billion (EUR 7 billion) to absorb it.
The subsidiary model
Each country bank is a separately capitalized subsidiary funded mainly by local deposits. That structure helped Santander get through the 2008 crisis and Spain's property crash without state aid, as profits from Brazil, Mexico and the UK offset Spanish losses.
Santander in 2026
Under Executive Chair Ana Botin and CEO Hector Grisi, Santander now runs five global businesses on increasingly shared technology. It earned a record ~$15.9 billion (EUR 14.1 billion) in 2025 and ~$8.25 billion (EUR 7.3 billion) of underlying profit in the first half of 2026. This year it sold its 49% stake in Santander Bank Polska, bought TSB in the UK and completed the $12.2 billion Webster Bank deal in the US, aiming for RoTE above 20% by 2028.
