Banco Santander

Spain – October 31, 2026 -- Banco Santander reported a record underlying profit of €11,176 million for the first nine months of 2026, up 16% year-on-year, as the TSB and Webster acquisitions lifted its customer base to 189 million. Attributable profit rose 20% to €12,405 million.

Disposal gain lifts attributable profit above underlying result

Attributable profit includes a €1.9 billion net capital gain from the completed sale of Santander Bank Polska in January. This was partly offset by €666 million in charges, including integration costs tied to TSB and Webster. Underlying results exclude these non-recurring items.

Underlying return on tangible equity (RoTE) reached 16.0%, up 1.1 percentage points. Statutory earnings per share rose 25%, and tangible net asset value plus cash dividend per share rose 11%.

Madrid – October 31, 2026 -- Banco Santander cut costs by more than 50% in an experimental customer-service use case while improving conversation quality, and has now signed a three-year AI collaboration framework with NVIDIA.

Smaller models cut serving costs from €5 to €0.03 per interaction

Santander AI Lab has moved progressively from large general-purpose models to smaller, specialised models built for specific banking tasks. In selected experimental use cases, serving costs fell from around €5 per interaction to approximately €0.03, with performance maintained.

The Lab runs inference within Santander's own architecture on NVIDIA Dynamo-Triton, the approach behind the serving-cost reduction.

BASKING RIDGE – October 29, 2026 -- Ascendion, an AI-native software engineering company serving 250+ enterprise clients, has appointed four former senior executives from banking, retail, high-tech and industry bodies to its AI Advisory Community as it steers its AAVA platform toward governed, production-scale enterprise AI.

The appointees are Andy Gamble, Jack Madrid, Julieta Ross, Ph.D., and Joseph Sirosh, Ph.D. Their combined experience spans banking, high-tech, media and retail. Each will work directly with Ascendion's regional and engineering leaders.