Western Europe's best bank for SMEs 2020: Banco Santander

With lockdowns shuttering businesses across the continent, commitment to banking small and medium-sized enterprises has taken on even greater economic and social importance this year. 

Euromoney’s best bank for SMEs in Western Europe, Banco Santander, has tackled this challenge head on, reflecting its increased focus on banking smaller businesses in recent years. 

Its position in SMEs in Europe today partly reflects its 2017 purchase of Banco Popular, which gave it the biggest market share in Spanish SMEs. But the focus is also appropriate in an era of ultra-low and negative rates, with wafer-thin margins in corporate banking and retail mortgages. 

Even before Covid-19, Santander, led by Ana Botín, was putting in more effort than most of its peers to developing its SME business, especially in Europe. The range of new SME banking initiatives at Santander over the last year is indeed outstanding.

In Spain, it launched a digital invoice financing service, Financia&Go, and backed Tresmares Capital, an independent private equity and debt provider that works alongside the bank’s network.