How Banco Santander uses AI

Banco Santander and Visa completed Santander's first controlled pilot of agentic commerce transactions in Latin America, with credentials from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay and powered by Visa Intelligent Commerce. AI agents bought books in four of the markets and chocolates in Brazil. The pilot tested consent capture, secure data handling and interoperability across merchants and payment networks, inside Visa's and Santander's regulated payment framework. No volumes or outcome figures are disclosed.

Banco Santander and Mastercard announced a live payment from start to finish that was initiated and executed by an AI agent, run in a controlled environment through Santander's live payments infrastructure using Mastercard Agent Pay, with PayOS orchestrating the transaction. The model lets agents pay on behalf of customers within predefined limits and permissions, and the aim was to validate the bank's operational and control framework under real conditions. The release calls it a pilot that is not a commercial rollout; Santander will now move into extended testing and scaling. No outcome figures are disclosed.

Santander says AI copilots support more than 40% of its contact center interactions. In Spain its speech analytics solution processes 10 million voice calls a year and fills the CRM systems automatically, which the bank says frees more than 100,000 hours a year for higher value work. The figures come from the bank's own story on its data and AI strategy of August 2025.

Santander says more than 6,000 of its developers already use AI tools, with productivity up 20 to 30% in some tasks, which speeds delivery and frees time for strategic work. The statement is part of the bank's own story on its data and AI strategy of August 2025; the tools are not named.