Company: BCDRF
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form Type: 20-F
Source: 0000891478-25-000054
Chunk: 477

Company: Banco Santander, S.A.
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form: 20-F
Chunk 477
---
                                      |     |                                |

Strategy

Digital Consumer Bank (Consumer) is a leading consumer finance company globally. It operates in 26 countries in Europe and the Americas and it serves the financing needs at the point of sale (both physical and digital) of 25 million customers. It combines three interconnected businesses: auto financing, consumer lending, supported by Zinia, and Openbank. Our vision in the Consumer business is to become the preferred choice of our partners and our end customers, and offer greater profitability and value creation to our shareholders, while being the most cost-efficient player in the industry. To respond to the changes the mobility and consumer finance ecosystem is undergoing and deliver on our vision, during 2024, we worked to transform our operating model by : • Offering global and best-in-class solutions, integrated into our partners' (OEMs, importers and retailers) processes, accompanying them as their increasingly digital business models evolve. • We continued to foster cross-regional partnerships and consolidate new partnerships by leveraging existing agreements, particularly in the US where we incorporated new strategic agreements in auto throughout the year and in Latin America where we continued to focus on developing strategic alliances. • We further upgraded our value proposition for improved customer experience. • Simplifying and automating our processes to increase scalability. We are working to align our functions with the Group's operating model. In the US, our focus has been on recovering pre-pandemic profitability, driving efficiency savings and improving our service. In Europe, we focused on transforming our operating model by streamlining the organization and making it more agile, accelerating process automatization, improving digital capabilities and converging towards global platforms. • Building and developing global platforms. Throughout the year, we:

• Expanded the functionalities of our auto leasing platform, operative in three European markets, and we opened the broker channel in Germany. • Continued to simplify our auto operating model in Europe, having moved from one platform per country to three in total, towards our final goal of having one common platform to support our aim of being the most cost-efficient player. • Fostered growth in Zinia, our check-out lending technology in Germany, through new agreements such as a co-branded card with Amazon and instalment loans with Apple. • Launched Openbank in the US in Q4 2024. We also prepared the launch of an Openbank branch in Germany (opened in January 2025) and the full launch of Openbank in Mexico (in February 2025) with a complete value proposition to compete with other neob