Santander launches a plan to boost SME growth

1. Comunicación Externa.
Ciudad Grupo Santander Edificio Arrecife Pl. 2
28660 Boadilla del Monte (Madrid) Telf.: 34 91 289 52 11
comunicacionbancosantander@gruposantander.com
Press Release
Santander launches a plan to boost SME growth
 The aim is to improve small and medium-sized companies’ access to loans and
financial services, new technologies, export markets and skilled labour.
 The Santander group wants to double its SME lending in Latin America to US$
20 billion and to increase its SME customers in the region by 100,000 a year to 1
million by 2016.
 This project is part of the group’s international strategy of supporting SMEs,
which includes initiatives such as the ‘Plan Exporta’ in Spain, or ‘Breakthrough’
in the United Kingdom.
Santander, June 26, 2013 – Javier San Félix, Banco Santander’s head of retail banking, said
SMEs offered a significant opportunity for growth in the bank’s Latin American markets and
announced the group was launching a strategic plan, ‘Santander SMEs’. He was speaking at
the XII Santander-Latin America Meeting at the Universidad Internacional Menendez Pelayo.
The new plan involves doubling SME lending in the region to US$ 20 billion by 2016,
excluding Brazil, and reaching 1 million customers by gaining 100,000 a year. San Félix also
stressed the importance of improving efficiency by automating transactions such as salaries
and card payments using point-of-sale terminals. He said Santander could be processing 1.4
million salaries within three years and dealing with 67 point-of-sale transactions a second,
compared with 1.1 million salaries and 48 point-of-sale terminal operations a second now.
Santander SMEs forms part of the group’s global policy of supporting SMEs in its main
markets. The bank is committed to improving these companies’ access to loans and financial
services, new technologies and skilled labour and helping them open up new international
markets.
This strategy includes initiatives such as the Plan Exporta in Spain, which, since its launch in
March, 2011, has allowed more than 8,000 SMEs to start exporting or to increase their
international sales, or the Breakthrough programme launched last year in the UK, with 200
million pounds of funding available to finance the small companies that are key to the UK’s
growth policy.
Santander’s global head of retail banking said the bank is “the financial leader in Latin
America and has been the region’s SME bank for many years”. This year its loan portfolio
there will exceed $12 billion, excluding Brazil, with more than 750,000 customers. In Mexico,
the bank’s SME lending has quadrupled in the last five years, while in Argentina it has tripled
and in Chile it is growing at more than 10% a year.

2. Comunicación Externa.
Ciudad Grupo Santander Edificio Arrecife Pl. 2
28660 Boadilla del Monte (Madrid) Telf.: 34 91 289 52 11
comunicacionbancosantander@gruposantander.com
San Félix said, however, that there are still many obstacles in the way of small Latin American
companies obtaining access to financing. Santander’s plan seeks to reduce the “widespread
informality and low productivity” of these businesses. “Without strong, competitive, well-
organised SMEs, a country’s growth will remain below its potential,” he said.
“SMEs have less contact with banks in the region than they do in other OECD countries. They
have fewer deposits, make less use of transactional services and even lending is lower,” he
said. Even if the proportion of people working in SMEs is similar to other OECD countries (two
out of three workers), Latin American SMEs’ contribution to GDP is about half the OECD rate.
“Latin America has a great opportunity to achieve economic growth and social wellbeing, but it
needs to increase SMEs’ contribution to GDP as they are the mainstays of employment
worldwide,” he said. In San Félix’s opinion, banks alone are not enough to drive SME growth.
He said governments, universities, employers’ associations, large companies, technology
firms and multinational institutions should all be involved.
“Santander has complete faith in SMEs. We want to provide more financial services and we
also want to help other players provide them with e-commerce, support their exports, open up
university education to their managers and ease their difficulties in finding qualified workers,”
San Félix said.
He added that Santander was in a unique position to help foster SMEs and could offer
elements that others could not, such as “our global support for university education and our
international programme of grants, our agreements with employers’ associations or our
permanent contacts with the public bodies that support SMEs”.