Santander is consolidating its retail and commercial business into a new global unit, the bank announced Monday.
The bank is also creating a global digital consumer banking division.
Both moves are geared toward helping the bank achieve goals it outlined at its investor day in February — among them, adding 40 million customers by 2025 and increasing its return on tangible equity to 15% to 17% in that time frame.
Cost savings targets were not disclosed, but the restructuring will likely reduce layers of management and could result in job cuts, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
The realignment stretches — to five — the number of primary reporting units at the bank. In that sense, the move is not entirely unlike the restructuring Citi announced last week.
Citi on Wednesday scrapped a two-prong model that divided the bank between its Institutional Clients Group and a unit that encompassed personal banking and wealth management, and replaced it with five primary units whose leaders report to CEO Jane Fraser. The move eliminated three regional leaders charged with overseeing the bank’s operations in roughly 160 countries.
For Santander, the combined retail-commercial unit and the digital consumer bank will stand alongside divisions encompassing payments, corporate and investment banking, and wealth management and insurance. The bank will begin reporting in earnings using the five-division model in January.
“We know from our progress since we first defined our strategy in 2015 that leveraging our unique combination of global scale and local leadership allows us to serve customers better, while delivering profitable growth,” Santander Chair Ana Botin said in a statement. “We are confident this is the right thing for our customers and will allow us to progress faster, delivering on all targets set out at Investor Day this year.”
The 17% ROTE target is a common one. Both Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase use that figure as a benchmark. Among European banks, Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas are aiming for a similar target (though Santander achieved 14.4% ROTE last year, compared with 12% at BNP and 10% at Deutsche, according to Bloomberg).
Santander’s retail and commercial unit will be led by Daniel Barriuso, who served for six years as the bank’s chief information security officer before becoming Santander’s chief transformation officer in June, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Jose Luis de Mora will lead the digital consumer bank, Santander announced. He has served as the bank’s head of consumer finance since 2020, according to LinkedIn.
Jose Linares and Victor Matarranz will continue to lead corporate and investment banking, and wealth management and insurance, respectively — as they have since 2017, the bank said.
The payments unit will continue to be split between PagoNxt CEO Javier San Felix and Matias Sanchez, the bank’s head of global cards.
Santander’s restructuring further narrows an approach it adopted in 2019, when it began emphasizing regional performance, as opposed to country by country. Under Santander’s latest structure, region-specific data will fill secondary reporting segments, the bank said.
