Banco Santander’s group executive chairman, Ana Botín, today unveiled plans for the creation of a global native digital consumer bank via the combination of Openbank and Santander Consumer Finance. This is one of Santander’s several initiatives aiming to to turn it the best open financial services platform.

Botín outlined these plans in her speech to shareholders at the Group’s annual general meeting, where shareholders approved the capital increase to distribute new shares equivalent to 0.10 euros per share as additional compensation for 2019, to be paid this year. This would bring total shareholder compensation for the year to 0.20 euros per share.

The global native digital consumer lending business will build on Santander Consumer Finance’s scale and presence in Europe as well as the Openbank digital platform.

“SCF and Openbank are two businesses with excellent potential for growth. SCF, Europe’s consumer finance leader, serves over 20 million customers in 15 markets. Openbank is outperforming – and outgrowing – European digital banks in deposits, with a full-fledged retail product suite marketed on an innovative, scalable and efficient banking platform, a software built by us”, Botín said.

Another key initiative aims to create payment solutions to compete with large payment platforms. Santander will combine its most disruptive payments businesses into a single, autonomous and wholly-owned company, which ”with the scale, the right talent, processes and governance, […] will form a powerful ecosystem of payment solutions”. The goal, according to Botín, is to “offer [solutions] first to Santander’s banks and, then, to new customers and third parties”.

In her opinion, ”payments are central to our loyalty strategy, and we have a reputation to uphold as one of the best global payment providers”. This new company will perform in three areas: merchant solutions, building on the Getnet platform; solutions for SMEs that trade internationally via Ebury; and digital products and services for retail consumers, based on the successful Superdigital, the financial inclusion platform for unbanked consumers in Latin America that is already available in five markets.

“This represents a global market opportunity of 500 billion euros in revenues” she said.