S

Santander

Global retail and commercial banking group

Head of Credit

Full-TimeUpdated on 10/23/2026Deadline 11/27/26
No salary listed
Expert
Bachelor's
Mexico City, CDMX, Mexico
In Person
Finance & BankingRetail & Commercial Banking

About the job

Requirements
  • Significant senior experience in credit, lending, consumer finance, credit cards, retail banking, fintech, or digital banking.
  • A proven track record defining or scaling credit strategies, lending products, or credit portfolios in a banking or financial services environment.
  • Demonstrated experience owning or managing P&L and portfolio performance within a credit, lending, or consumer finance business.
  • A relevant university degree or equivalent professional experience is preferred.
  • Fluency in Spanish and English is required.
  • Strong understanding of credit risk, portfolio management, underwriting, pricing, collections, and risk-adjusted profitability.
  • Strong commercial and financial acumen, with the ability to balance growth, risk, and returns and drive risk-adjusted portfolio profitability.
  • Experience working with data, analytics, and decisioning teams to build credit models, scorecards, or automated lending capabilities.
  • Ability to move from business vision to product, policy, and operational implementation.
  • Experience influencing senior stakeholders across Product, Risk, Finance, Legal, Compliance, Operations, and Technology.
  • Strategic thinking combined with practical execution.
  • Strong business judgment and analytical mindset.
  • Ability to make decisions in complex, fast-moving environments.
  • Strong stakeholder management and collaboration skills.
Responsibilities
  • Define the end-to-end credit strategy for Openbank Mexico, including product scope, portfolio priorities, customer segments, credit criteria, and growth roadmap.
  • Own the credit P&L, ensuring sustainable growth and balancing origination, pricing, cost of risk, portfolio performance, and profitability.
  • Lead end-to-end portfolio management, defining performance objectives and actively managing growth, risk, returns, and customer value across the credit lifecycle.
  • Lead the design of the credit operating model, ensuring clear governance across Business, Risk, Product, Operations, Data, and Technology teams.
  • Develop credit policies, portfolio management principles, and decisioning frameworks aligned with risk appetite, regulatory expectations, and business objectives.
  • Partner with Product and Data teams to design digital credit journeys, underwriting models, scorecards, pricing logic, and customer lifecycle strategies.
  • Own the strategic view of credit portfolio performance, including origination quality, risk-adjusted profitability, approval rates, delinquency, collections performance, and customer value.
  • Work closely with senior stakeholders to support business cases, roadmap prioritization, launch planning, and commercial decision-making.
  • Identify market opportunities, competitive dynamics, and customer needs across consumer credit, lending, and credit card propositions.
  • Build strong relationships with internal teams across Openbank and Santander Group, ensuring consistency with global standards while adapting the model to the Mexican market.
  • Support the preparation of senior management materials, committee discussions, and strategic updates related to credit performance and development.
Desired Qualifications
  • Previous exposure to fintech, digital banking, consumer lending, credit cards, or high-growth financial services businesses will be highly valued.

About the company

Santander is a global bank focusing on retail and commercial banking in Europe and the Americas. It serves individuals and SMEs through strong regional franchises (Spain, Brazil, the UK, the US) and a broad Consumer Finance arm, while supporting multinational clients via its Corporate & Investment Banking division. It digitalizes core banking on its Gravity cloud to rapidly deploy digital solutions like Openbank and cross-border services, blending fintech agility with a traditional bank balance sheet. Its goal is to improve efficiency under the One Santander framework, grow cross-border revenue, and finance sustainable initiatives aligned with Net Zero targets.

Company Size

10,001+

Company Stage

IPO

Headquarters

Boadilla del Monte, Spain

Founded

1902

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Green finance reached €188 billion by June 2026, 85% of the 2030 target.
  • Peru's 467 MWp Illa solar financing expands Santander's Andean project-finance franchise.
  • H1 2026 revenue grew 6.5%, supporting management's 2026 profit-growth target.

What critics are saying

  • Santander UK booked £633 million for motor-finance redress; tribunal hearings run into 2027.
  • Webster integration threatens synergies, capital ratios, and the 2028 U.S. profitability thesis.
  • Santander UK cut 44 branches in 2026, risking customer attrition and labor conflict.

What makes Santander unique

  • Santander completed Webster acquisition on August 20, 2026, creating a top-ten U.S. bank.
  • Gravity migrated 97% of IT to cloud, enabling faster product rollouts.
  • Openbank and Work Cafés give Santander a hybrid digital-branch model across markets.

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Benefits

  • Health, dental, & vision
  • 401k
  • Flexible PTO
  • Parental & sick leave
  • Discounts: technology, travel, auto, fitness, & tuition

Growth & Insights and Company News

6 month growth

-3%

1 year growth

-3%

2 year growth

-3%
AD HOC NEWS
Oct 21st, 2026
Unicasa secures $8.9M BNDES loan as Q2 net loss hits $0.9M

Brazilian furniture maker Unicasa secured BRL 50 million in financing on October 1, 2026, through a BNDES programme arranged by Santander. The loan costs CDI minus 1.15% a year. The loan has a 12-month grace period and 48 months of amortisation. Semiannual payments run from April 2028 to October 2031. The funding comes as the company struggles with profitability. Second-quarter revenue rose to BRL 54.60 million from BRL 40.90 million in the first quarter, but the net loss was BRL 5.20 million. Unicasa raised BRL 61.80 million in 2025 and ended that year with net debt of BRL 67.00 million.

FinanzNachrichten.de
Oct 20th, 2026
Orano Has Launched a New 7 Year Bond Issue of 500 Million Euros

Regulatory News: Today Orano has launched and set under its EMTN Program the terms for a 7 year bond issue for an amount of 500 million euros (maturity in October 2033) with an annual coupon of 4.75%

Finadium
Oct 19th, 2026
Santander developing AI model triage to lower costs of deployment.

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."

El País
Oct 19th, 2026
Santander partners with Nvidia to deploy AI across the entire bank

Santander partners with Nvidia to deploy AI across the entire bank

Media9Par, S.A.
Oct 15th, 2026
Exus secures $226M from Santander and Société Générale to grow European energy and digital infrastructure

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.