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Santander developing AI model triage to lower costs of deployment. October 19, 2026 Banco Santander announced its AI Lab has developed new capabilities to evaluate AI models and agents for banking applications, helping identify which model is best suited for each task and deploy it in the most efficient way. As part of this effort, Santander has been progressively moving from large general-purpose models towards smaller, specialized models designed for specific banking tasks. In selected experimental use cases, this approach has reduced serving costs from around €5 per interaction to approximately €0.03 while maintaining strong performance. Through the Lab, Santander has built Model Arena to evaluate open-weight models against banking tasks and identify the right model for each workload, and is specializing models using NVIDIA NeMo Customizer. Customer-service comparisons delivered evidence that smaller, specialized models can deliver strong performance on targeted banking tasks. Santander has built specialized intelligence for core banking workloads on NVIDIA Kumo, a family of open-weight foundation models for structured data, allowing companies to quickly turn structured data into predictive insights needed for agentic services. The Lab is industrializing inference within Santander's own architecture using NVIDIA Dynamo-Triton, the approach behind the serving-cost reduction above, and is developing Model Arena to design, simulate, evaluate and supervise banking agents, alongside performance engineering and adversarial testing of conversational AI in controlled environments. The goal is to establish a rigorous experimentation path through which emerging AI technologies are optimized and stress-tested against banking requirements before successful capabilities scale across Santander. Building on these advances, Santander is progressing from open-weight models towards specialized models and governed banking agents designed for greater control, safety and lower operating costs at scale. The collaboration is already delivering measurable results: in an experimental customer-service use case, Santander improved conversation quality while reducing costs by more than 50% through the deployment of a more efficient AI model. As part of the next phase of the initiative, Santander and NVIDIA have established a three-year collaboration framework covering areas such as foundation models, AI agents, fraud and anti-money laundering capabilities, real-time decisioning and advanced simulation technologies, including a banking digital twin. Iñaki Bernal, chief artificial intelligence officer at Santander, said in z statement: "NVIDIA is a key player in the infrastructure, software and research that is powering the latest advances in artificial intelligence. Combined with Santander's scale across businesses, customers and geographies, we believe we are uniquely positioned to succeed in transforming those advances into practical banking capabilities." Aser Blanco, Global Banking lead at NVIDIA, said in a statement: "Banking is one of the most data-centric industries. Data sits at the heart of every process and now banks need to become intelligence-centric. Transforming years of data into usable and proprietary intelligence is not about model size, but about training and fine tuning. In this new world, cost per intelligence output is a key metric. Santander is showing what that looks like in production with smaller models, specialized on the bank's own data, evaluated against real banking tasks and served efficiently enough to run at the scale of a global bank."

Exus, an integrated energy and digital infrastructure platform, has secured a €200 million financing from Banco Santander and Société Générale. The holding-level deal will refinance existing debt and fund construction, acquisitions, and new project development. A letter of credit facility will also support grid connection and offtake requirements for energy and digital projects. Exus develops, builds, and operates generation, storage, and grid infrastructure that supplies firm, reliable power to the grid and large consumers. "Exus is on a strong growth path, and this financing gives us a scalable structure to build on," said João Pedro Summaville, chief financial officer. He said it strengthens the company's ability to keep investing as it expands in Europe. Both banks acted as Mandated Lead Arrangers and Co-Underwriters. Santander also served as Facility Agent and Security Agent.

Global law firm Clifford Chance has advised a syndicate of lenders on US$480 million in senior unsecured facilities for Alicorp, a Peruvian consumer goods company. The financing includes a five-year US$250 million term loan facility and a three-year US$230 million revolving credit facility. The term loan is divided into tranches for Alicorp's operations in Colombia (up to US$110 million), Spain (US$35 million), and Ecuador (US$90 million). The revolving facility is for Alicorp's Peruvian entity and includes two one-year extension options. Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase Bank, and Banco Santander served as joint lead arrangers and bookrunners. The transaction spans four jurisdictions and two currencies, with proceeds earmarked for general corporate purposes and liquidity management.