“Can a 168-year-old universal bank turn its core platforms — cards (Plard), acquiring (Getnet), and payments rails (PagoNxt Payments Hub) — into open-market infrastructure and out-execute fintechs on their own ground?”
Founded in 1857 as a trade-finance bank between Spain and the Americas, Santander evolved into a global retail bank across 9 core markets. Beginning around 2021 the group pivoted from country-siloed operations to five global platforms — most notably Payment Solutions (Global Cards + PagoNxt) — and started monetizing its infrastructure by opening it up to the market: PagoNxt runs Payments Hub as SaaS, Getnet aggregates LatAm merchant acquiring under a single integration, and Plard is a global cloud-native card issuing platform. In parallel Openbank/Consumer Finance built Zinia to reclaim BNPL share from fintechs. Gravity, the internally built cloud core, is central to the modernization thesis.