Santander Places Shared IT at the Heart of Its Cost-and-Growth Strategy

Santander’s two-year growth plan leans heavily on IT transformation built around a common technology platform and a unified global operating model. At its investor day in London on February 25, the European banking giant also shared its vision to achieve profits above €20 billion by 2028, which would be a 40 percent increase over its record 2025 profit.

Citing its ‘build-once, reuse everywhere’ approach as a key enabler of growth and cost efficiency, the bank exemplifies how financial services institutions can overcome one of the biggest drags on digital velocity in the sector. When doing business across multiple regions and jurisdictions, financial services companies, being among the most heavily regulated, face a huge duplication of effort challenge, which drains human resources and renders more traditional technology strategies effectively obsolete. This includes multiple onboarding stacks, different regulatory rules by market, parallel data platforms, and inconsistent feature sets to name a few.

Santander’s approach centers on establishing a consolidated infrastructure where local regulatory and product variations can be handled modularly as addons. In other words, it involves standardizing the various layers that make up the technology stack, such as shared customer identities, a common data platform, reusable components, and shared payment rails—all consolidated under a unified workflow and observability layer for handling services, disputes, and exceptions.

From an efficiency perspective, the benefits of platform consolidation are clearer than ever. Too often, the biggest barriers to multinational expansion are technology related. For instance, each jurisdiction has different standards and regulations, which legacy technology stacks can struggle to accommodate. Moreover, these stacks are often fragmented across branches and regions, forcing banks to refactor their environments or rebuild them from scratch multiple times over. On the flipside, as Santander demonstrated at its investor day, having a common IT architecture helps consolidate and standardize risk. This makes it easier to manage change, maintain strong observability across markets, and keep ahead of third-party risk.

The same applies to mergers and acquisitions which, in financial services particularly, have long been plagued by difficulties in consolidating operations while managing risk. After all, banks are especially vulnerable to both internal and external security threats and compliance failures during M&As, hence the need for a proactive approach. For instance, Santander recently acquired US lender Webster Bank, doubling down on its efforts to make its US operations one of its biggest markets alongside Spain and Britain. Naturally, having a unified IT platform makes integration much easier (and safer) during M&As.

Santander’s example suggests that selling will shift from country-based teams to group platforms. For fintechs vendors, that might mean fewer entry points into the market, but it potentially means larger deal sizes for those that successfully align with global architecture. To stay relevant, fintechs will need to prioritize API-first, modular architectures that allow them to drop components into standardized workflows that can be governed centrally.