Santander targets institutional and larger corporate clients, as well as aiming at SMEs.
“The footprint we have makes us unique,” Maortua says. “First of all, we have a strong presence in Latin America and, second, we have a very strong presence in Spain and Portugal. What we are currently doing regarding our corporate network and our institutional investors is to position ourselves as the Latin bank of choice for them – to structure solutions for a good proportion of those companies. If we excel on the Latin front, this also gives us a very good edge to get into all those corporates and institutional investors to keep on selling or providing other types of structured solutions or financial solutions to them.”
Only connect
Maortua explains that the retail network in addition to the Latin angle is important for penetrating the client base. The bank is working on two fronts: one targets institutional and larger corporate clients, the other aims at retail clients – smaller and medium-size enterprises.
“We have created a concept that we call Santander Global Connect,” Maortua says. “It is basically a way to sell risk management products to small and medium-size enterprises.