Santander
“Can a 168-year-old global bank rebuild itself as a digital-first financial platform — via Gravity core banking, PagoNxt payments, Openbank digital brand, and Zinia BNPL — competitive with the neobanks and paytechs it helped create through its venture arm?”
Santander is a 168-year-old Spanish universal bank that has undergone a decade-long digital transformation, moving from a branch-centric model to a multi-market digital banking strategy. The key embedded-finance angle is twofold: internally, Santander built Gravity (a proprietary cloud-native core banking platform) to migrate off mainframes and power Openbank, its fully digital consumer bank brand now expanding globally. Externally, Santander created PagoNxt/Payment Solutions as a standalone paytech business to compete with fintechs in acquiring and BNPL (via Zinia), while its CIB arm partners with SAP and runs SanTradeIQ for corporate treasury. The bank operates its own insurance (Santander Insurance via bancassurance) and lending verticals at scale rather than relying on third-party embedded finance vendors.