In 2023, Santander (NYSE: SAN) recruited over 4,500 employees with digital skills around the world to drive the group’s transformation.
The growing demand for these types of professionals in the market, in particular in financial institutions, led Santander “to launch a targeted recruitment strategy under the Be Tech! with Santander program.”
Thanks to this initiative, the bank says that it “now boasts 27,500 STEM professionals (a category that covers careers related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in its 10 core markets in Europe and the Americas.”
The main goal of this program is to “attract and recruit the best technology talent to support Santander’s vision of becoming the best open financial services platform and accelerate its digital transformation.”
To achieve this, the bank is looking for professionals “with digital and technology backgrounds in such areas as the cloud, cybersecurity, data, DevSecOps, artificial intelligence, software development, enterprise architecture and product management.”
This program, which has “been launched in several countries where the bank operates, such as Spain, Brazil, Mexico, the United Kingdom or the United States, has 400 vacancies for technology roles open on its website.
The bank further noted that it “has used Gravity to expand and diversify its technology capability that, among other advances, has enabled it to move over 95% of its infrastructure to the cloud.”
Santander hopes to have “moved the majority of its core banking around the world to the Gravity platform by the end of 2024. It has already migrated all of its business clients in the UK, consumer clients in Chile, and the Corporate & Investment Banking (Santander CIB) business without any service interruption, and the transition is progressing well in Brazil. Once the program is complete, the Gravity platform will manage more than a billion technical operations per year through Santander’s systems.”
Santander uses proprietary software “to digitalize its core banking, the most critical part of a financial institution’s technological infrastructure where transfers, deposits, loans and other key financial operations are processed.”
This transformation makes data access faster and easier, “simplifies processes, streamlines the time to market and helps the bank enhance customer experience and its products and services significantly.
At the end of 2022, Santander announced “the launch of two technology centers in Malaga (Spain) and Warsaw (Poland) to lend support and technological services to the group’s business units.”
These two hubs will employ “around 1,400 professionals with STEM backgrounds who will contribute to the bank’s digital and commercial transformation.”
Together with these two centers, the group says it “has similar facilities in Bilbao and Valencia (which provide services to Openbank), Valladolid (Santander Consumer Finance), Solares, Cantabria, and central services in the countries where Santander operates.”