Company: BCDRF
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form Type: 20-F
Source: 0000891478-25-000054
Chunk: 464

Company: Banco Santander, S.A.
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form: 20-F
Chunk 464
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0.04%). |     |           |

Annual report 2024 433

| Contents |     | Business model and strategy |     | Sustainability statement |     | Corporate governance |     | Economic and financial review |     | Riskmanagement and compliance |

3.6 Special situations and resolution

Corporate special situations and resolution framework, crisis management, recovery and resolution planning

This section summarizes the main developments in the year relating to preparing and strengthening mechanisms for a potential crisis, recovery plans and preparing and executing initiatives to improve resolvability plans.

Corporate framework for special situations and resolution

The framework enables our units to aggregate and clearly interpret the various mechanisms for monitoring, escalating and managing both financial and non-financial events as well as governance. It helps link the action plans (e.g. contingency plans, business continuity plans, recovery plan) to be executed in each phase.

We base crisis governance on a collective decision-making model that is organized into and operated under severity levels to facilitate flexibility and sequential decision-making. For instance, in the most severe stages of a hypothetical crisis, the Gold committee, composed of the Group’s top executives supported by the Silver forum and other specialist Bronze teams, would be the leading decision-making body.

The framework aims to encourage the sharing of best practices across the Group and continuous collaboration between subsidiaries and corporate teams (including coordination in the recovery and resolution planning phases) to continue to develop our management and control model in the most effective way.

Two of Santander's key processes are the recovery plan and the bail-in playbook, which describes the resolution tool's execution.

Crisis management

We managed several important events in 2024 relating to i) cybersecurity (e.g., unauthorized access to a database hosted by a third party); ii) geopolitical and/or macroeconomic events (e.g., armed conflicts in the Middle East); iii) natural disasters (e.g., forest fires in Valparaíso, Chile; floods in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in Poland and in dozens of Spanish municipalities, earthquake in the Chinese provinces of Gansu and Qinghai); and iv) operational events (e.g., related to the operation of digital channels or critical providers).

We have taken away important lessons from these events, including:

• The benefits of ex ante preparation. Crisis management simulation exercises conducted over the past few years have enabled us to act quickly.

• The importance of maintaining a consistent and global approach that enables us to act as a Group, regardless of the type of event, where the incident occurs, the size of the affected unit