Liga Santander fourth annual profit record

Madrid. Banco Santander, the first financial institution in Spain and the third in business volume in Mexico, obtained a historic annual profit of 14,101 million euros in 2025, 12 percent more than last year, adding four records in a row.

In addition, the banking group chaired by Ana Patricia Botín announced a major movement in the United States market: the acquisition of Webster Financial Corporation, the parent company of Webster Bank, for 12.2 billion dollars.

The annual data of the Santander Group, which will be officially presented this Wednesday at the headquarters, in the Madrid town of Boadilla del Monte, confirm the good moment of the bank, whose highest authority is the Spanish Botín and whose CEO is the Mexican financier Héctor Grisi, who took office in 2023.

In recent years, Santander has widened the gap with its most direct competitors, with annual results that have improved year after year, especially since the fall of the pandemic year, as occurred with almost the entire international financial system.

The entity also reported that it reached 180 million clients, after adding 8 million in fiscal year 2025. These results are supported by the evolution of the interest margin, record commission income and improvements in efficiency.

Its profits in the fourth quarter of 2025 amounted to 3,764 million euros, 15 percent more than in the same period of 2024.

Botín pointed out in a virtual press conference that “in 2025 we once again achieved record results and fulfilled our three-year strategic plan. We added 8 million new clients, achieved record commission income, reduced costs and increased earnings per share 17 percent. The results reflect the success of our strategy, the discipline in capital allocation and the impact that the network effect has on our global businesses. The deployment of shared global platforms is improving the customer experience and reducing the cost of service, driving sustained operating leverage and an improvement in our efficiency ratio from 45.8 to 41.2 percent over the last three years. So we have made great progress; we have increased profits at a cumulative rate of 30 percent.”

Regarding the purchase of Webster Financial Corporation, parent company of Webster Bank, a diversified entity based in Stamford, Connecticut, the board explained that the operation is equivalent to about 4 percent of Santander’s assets and places the subsidiary of the Spanish bank in the US market among the top 10 retail and business banking entities in the entire country by volume of assets.