Company: BCDRF
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form Type: 20-F
Source: 0000891478-25-000054
Chunk: 315

Company: Banco Santander, S.A.
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form: 20-F
Chunk 315
---
 EUR 5.24 at the end of the year. Total shareholder return during the year was 23.2%.

• These accomplishments enabled us to exceed our strategic goals set for 2024 bonus pool, mainly in capital and customer growth, so total executive variable remuneration increased by 4% compared to the previous year.

Shareholder engagement and responsiveness

Santander has historically received strong support for our remuneration policy proposals — averaging 90% between 2019 and 2023. However, at our 2024 annual shareholder meeting, the remuneration policy proposal received support from 74.8% of votes for. This lower-than-usual support prompted our board of directors to engage with our top shareholders to understand their perspectives on our remuneration system, identify any concerns leading to votes against our proposed policy and make changes to assume best possible alignment with shareholders.

Meetings were held with the16 top investors (controlling approximately 24% of the Banco Santander's share capital) and with the major proxy advisory firms, ISS and Glass Lewis (regarding their methodologies and vote recommendations). All of these discussions were led by Glenn Hutchins, our Lead Independent Director and Chairman of our remuneration committee (see 'Statement from Glenn Hutchins, Lead Independent Director' in section 1 and 'Engagement with shareholders in 2024' in section 3.1). While primarily focused on remuneration, these meetings also covered additional topics of interest to our investors including board structure, sustainability strategy and virtual shareholder meetings.

Changes approved based on shareholder feedback

Overall feedback and insights received for many aspects of our remuneration programme were positive, since the company is committed to paying for performance and a significant portion of pay is at risk, but some general themes emerged during discussions, including expectations around an increase of the percentage of variable pay which is long-term oriented and higher threshold for TSR vesting. Our remuneration committee and the board of directors carefully reviewed our shareholders’ feedback and have taken steps to address these concerns. This has resulted in a number of changes to our remuneration policy for 2025, as summarized below (for more details on these actions, see section 6.4 ):

1. The portion of variable remuneration paid in equity has increased from 50% to 60%.

2. The minimum relative TSR threshold for vesting has increased from the 40 th percentile versus peers to the 50 th percentile in the long-term award, as several investors have indicated this as