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Ana Botín
Speech at the X International Banking Conference
This is the 10th
edition of this conference. It´s great to have you here and I hope all of you will actively
participate in this debate.
But first let me say thank you to our minister Luis de Guindos who´s been with us for 6 times out of 10
international banking conferences. Our minister has had a huge role in making Spain today one of the
fastest growing economies in Europe and for a third year in a row creating hundreds of thousands of
jobs. Thank you for what you do for this country. I hope you will continue for many more years.
In recent decades there have been many changes happening in the world not just in the political but the
economic front. This has meant huge changes in our economy and the way we run our business. This
also means that many people have not been able to be part of this improvement we´re seeing and that
is creating populism.
That´s why, this year, we want this conference to look forward. Let´s not look back at the financial crisis,
which we´ve spoken about it many times. Today, I want to focus on what the digital transformation
means for all of us with a special focus on companies and particularly, on banks.
Not long ago, when we talked about change, we talked about tera-bytes. Now it´s theta-bytes which is
ten to a power of 21.
During the most recent New Year´s Eve, two million people booked lodging via AirBNB. Marriot-
Starwood, the world´s largest hotel chain has 1.1 million rooms. What this means for all our industries is
huge. Things are probably going to change much more than what we today anticipate. It´s difficult to
visualize.
What it means for companies we need not just a strategy, but we must execute that strategy as fast and
as flexibly as possible. It´s all about talent. At the base of our strategy is how to attract the talent we
need. That will determine our success.
As a country it´s about more and better education. It´s about creating jobs today and allowing
businesses to continue to grow. It’s about supporting entrepreneurs in a better way. Here in Europe
we´re more risk averse. We need to understand that we´re going to make mistakes and that´s crucial for
us to succeed in this new economy.
Translating this as a company, we must embrace cultures that are more open and more collaborative.
We´re going to progress if we work together. Not just in Santander but outside Santander. It´s about
building a culture that reflects these values. Because in the end, it´s getting the speed right. Being able
to change as fast as possible.
We as leaders, need to show that we are going to change ourselves. Even if this means making hard
choices. And we need to show our teams, our shareholders, our customers, our communities that we
have a vision, we have a strategy that we´re executing that strategy not just thinking about succeeding
today, but succeeding five or ten years from now.

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In Spain and in Europe, we have a very strong starting point. I think Europe is the best possible model. It
doesn´t mean it´s perfect. It doesn´t mean we don´t have to change it. Our starting point is strong. We
have the skills. We have the best social model that we know. Now what we need is to aspire to
excellence.
As a group we know that we need certain elements of excellence and that is good for the whole system.
If we think about the financial crisis, it was very good for the financial system that there were some
banks that were stronger during the crisis. Again, excellence is good. Not just for those that achieve
excellence it´s good for the whole group or the whole country.
Let me go on to share with you a focused vision on banks.
The first duty of any company is to serve its people because that is in the end the base of our success.
When we talk about digital, about computers, we always end up again with our people. Talent.
People because technology is at the service of our customers. Technology has to work. When it doesn´t
work, our customers go.
Technology is about people that can build the technology that works for our customers. For employees,
the digital transformation must serve as a ladder so they can grow as professionals and they can achieve
their goals.
We need people that have three qualities to succeed in the future. The first, empathy. We need
empathy to understand our customers, understand our teams. Second, we need creative people
because we need to change. We need to have a vision for the future. Creativity is hugely important. And
third, technical skills. Mathematics matters. We need to know numbers. So we need technical people
that are also creative and have empathy.
We need a culture that is open, agile and collaborative with strong values. We must offer a service that
people need and at Santander, we also want to be a bank that is simple, personal and fair.
Now why does all this matter? For one very simple reason which is at the base of Santander´s strategy
for the last three years and that is loyalty. We want to grow our number of loyal customers. We want to
have loyal employees that are happy and proud of working for our company. Loyalty is more important
than ever before.
As for talent, this is also the way to attract the best people. With the best people, we can make our
customers closer to us and make them happier and recommend us to their friends. And by doing this
we´ll generate stable, predictable and growing profits which is what our shareholders want and are
asking of us. And finally, this allows us to reinvest in our communities.
So as a bank today servicing 131 million customers, we can have a huge impact. And this is important to
attract talent: we can help change the world in those markets where we operate.
I was sharing with you before the example of Airbnb and Marriot. It´s easy to finance Marriot, they have
assets. We understand that. Real estate is something you can touch. What are the assets of Airbnb? It´s
much harder so this is fundamental. And this is something that we as banks and we at Santander have
been focusing on for quite a few years already. I´m going to share a few examples. Otherwise it´s hard
for you to visualize what it means.

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And the first question is how do we provide capital, financing and services in a digital economy? How
does a bank – we have not been very good at this traditionally – understand these new businesses
where the assets are walking out the door every night.
In September we held an event at the National Gallery in London. It was the fifth anniversary of
Breakthrough, a program that we launched in London during the crisis in 2012.
The government then was trying to incentivize the banks because there was not enough capital for small
companies. They wanted us to work together as a sector to do this.
We decided we wanted to do something to help more loans to get to these small companies. And that´s
when we launched a program called Breakthrough.
We did a study. We actually went out there for three months and asked thousands of companies
throughout the UK what is it they do not have from banks. And we found that there were about 70,000
companies in the UK that were fast growth, that were responsible or a big part – two thirds – of the jobs
being created by SMEs, that had too much debt to qualify for a loan from a bank and they didn´t want to
give the company away to investors because, why would they work for someone else when they knew
their company was going to grow really fast?
So we tailored a product, and this is very common for bigger companies but I think even today we are
the only bank in the UK to offer this. We structured a kind of mezzanine growth capital that was tailored
to each individual company. And, by the way, it was flexible. It could be used to finance working capital
or real estate, whatever that company needed to grow but it was a five, six, seven year loan tailored
against cash flows.
This is what I call process innovation. This is a big innovation which is not really well understood and as
I´ve said, I wish all other banks would copy us. Then, the impact would be much greater.
Now the good news is that thanks to Breakthrough, in five years, we provided 500 million pounds to 170
SMEs in the UK and we helped create about 8,000 jobs and we also helped the SMEs in other ways. The
Breakthrough program is not just about financing, a financing tailored to the digital age. It´s about
services. A lot of these small companies do not have the capacity to grow overseas. They don´t have the
time, they don´t have the resources, they don´t have the knowledge. They don´t have the teams.
Just to give you an example, this year, we´re going to do 40 overseas trade missions with 1,000
companies. At every one of these trade missions, there are actual transactions happening that go from
UK to Brazil or Boston, even the Middle East where we actually put them in contact and actually close
transactions.
But we also do more for these companies. We´re also helping them with our Santander universities
program. This year again we´re going to put 6,000 young people from universities into SMEs where
Santander is not just helping doing the matching, which, by the way is the most important thing because
of our strong relationships with universities but we also co-finance the beginning. It´s about helping our
SME customers grow in a better way.

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I can tell you similar stories here in Spain. We have a program called Advance, a fantastic program.
We´ve helped entrepreneurs like Carlos Ledo to expand his business of non-chemical, that is healthy,
fertilizers for fruits and vegetables.
Four years ago, Carlos, an agricultural engineer from Valencia, came to us to ask for help. A few years
before, he began to do research about natural fertilizers. He went back to Roman times when they
learned to use powdered milk as a fungicide for grapes. He found that garlic keeps birds away.
Everybody was very skeptical because they thought these non-chemical fertilizers were never going to
work. They actually do work and the way he was able to launch this venture was because he talked to
his branch manager from Santander in a small village near Valencia. We lent him the money but we also
gave him access to overseas contacts and much more. Since he came to Santander, in four years, his
sales have gone from 600,000 to 17 million. And he has opened offices in Mexico, in Italy, in Chile, in
Peru. He exports to 31 countries. He has 91 employees.
This is my point. Small companies today need the same services as large corporations. How do you help
small companies with the same resources and in the same way we are used to helping big companies?
Because the small companies are increasingly complex to understand. They need tools to go abroad
faster. The opportunities in the market have to be taken advantage of much faster.
This is the way that we as a bank are finding answers to the challenges we face, which are huge. It´s a
new way of understanding how to help companies, especially small ones grow so they can create more
and better jobs.
I have many other examples I can share with you because this is actually happening every day in our
business. But really the point is, how do we allow more people to share in this growth and prosperity
that technology and innovation is bringing to society? How to help in a better way these small
businesses to grow? The consequences of us not doing this are also huge.
According to the World Bank, the global economy will need to create 600 million jobs over the next 10
years or so. That´s five million each month. Simply to keep pace with projected youth employment rates.
Another topic we will be covering today is financial inclusion. We need everybody to be bankarized, to
understand finance, to be able to have an account. And there´s two billion people in the world today
who do not have a bank account. What are we doing about this?
We launched in Brazil just a few years ago a new service called Super Digital. It´s simple, low cost,
mobile banking and actually, it´s not a bank. It is very responsible. In one year, we reached one million
users. It´s like a chat. It´s like WhatsApp. Making payments and having a bank-like account in your
WhatsApp. It´s bringing hundreds of thousands of people into the financial system, which is hugely
important.
And the second example is micro-credit in Brazil that´s been going on for quite a few years already and,
actually, around three quarters of our customers are women. It´s women who want to borrow small
amounts of money to help their families and to create jobs.

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We have many amazing examples of this. This is one of the things that attracts people to work at
Santander. We can have a huge impact.
Around a quarter of a million micro entrepreneurs have been helped in this way.
We have a great story about Rosa from a town in northeast Brazil. She was selling books from door to
door to help her family. In 2008 she borrowed a small amount from us to open a classroom. 90 children
attend that school. Half go for free as they cannot afford tuition. She´s helping to teach how to read and
write to children who otherwise would be on the street.
Again, this is something we´re expanding to other countries. I was just in Mexico where we launched
Tuiio, a fantastic new program also to help micro-entrepreneurs and we´re also launching Super Digital
in Mexico.
I´ll just share one last example which is Openbank. We relaunched Openbank because of the concept
and spirit that we want to be. Openbank is open on technology. It has 90 employees, a million
customers, about 7 billion in deposits. It can do everything that Santander Spain can do, but it has no
branches. It actually has one branch.
It´s very important that we continue to invest. Every customer wants different things. Some customers
want to go to branches, some do not want to go to branches. We want to give them the option. It´s
about being able to offer customers what they want, but the goal is to offer all the trust of Santander
but the agility of a start up.
So we can innovate much faster. We can launch new products in a matter of days, even, of weeks and
this is hugely important to compete and offer customers what they want.
Just to show you very briefly. This month Openbank will have on offer all the products on the asset side
and on the liability side. We did our first mortgage back in July. Mortgages are a very complex process
because there are many actors involved. There was just one thing we couldn´t digitize. That was the
notary. The signer has to sign in person.
When we talk about innovation, people also matter.
As we reflect on what this exponential change means for all of us, as a society and as a company we
have to step back and ask not just what is efficient but what is fair and equitable.
Sometimes putting things into practice is easier for us in the private sector. Breakthrough is a great
example. We can work in partnership with the public sector to find answers.
It´s important that when public officials, governments, regulators think about new laws and regulation,
they consider the impact they have on banks because they are also impacting millions of people.
We also need to consider there is no such thing as neutral regulation. There is always an impact. There
are two things to keep in mind.
One is that we try to have a level playing field. If you give a loan, you give a loan. It doesn´t matter if
you´re a bank, or something else. If you take a deposit, you take a deposit. This is the way we should
think about to whom regulation applies.

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The second thing is that agility is important. In a world that is changing so fast, we cannot have laws and
regulations that take years to change, if, when we implement them, we realize that the consequences
are not what we intended.
What we need in Europe is legislation that supports investment in digital technology and digital
transformation in banks.
Today, Europeans shop on Amazon, communicate with their friends on WhatsApp, look for jobs on
LinkedIn and search on Google. I´m sure you realize what these companies have in common, right?
They´re American.
China now accounts for half the world’s digital payments and three quarters of online lending.
Last year, China’s total internet payments market was worth $11 trillion, twice the size of America’s
credit and debit card industry.
Europe is in a strong position today. It’s competitive and growing. It’s got a great industrial base and a
strong social model.
It´s better to change when you´re strong. So now is the time to change, to integrate more deeply so
businesses can grow and create jobs.
So they can take full advantage of the opportunities technology provides.
So let me conclude by saying this.
We should not underestimate the scale of the changes ahead. There are many challenges - but there are
also opportunities - some of which are huge.
As the digital revolution gathers momentum, success in the future will not just be measured in terms of
growth or profits.
Success will be measured by the public’s trust in, and loyalty towards, businesses like ours.
To earn that trust and loyalty, we need to be sustainable, managing change in a way that has an eye on
the future, not just today.
And we need to act responsibly, respecting the power that business has to make lives better, and to
help people and businesses prosper.

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That’s why, in a digital world, being sustainable and responsible is essential if we are to continue to
grow.
So for me, as someone leading a business that plans on being around not just for a couple of years, but
fifty years from now, a responsible business is just good business.
Thank you.