The payments platform, which already has 1,400 employees, wants to attract individuals, corporates and other banks to use its infrastructure.
Santander will open PagoNxt to the market in 2021, taking a leap forward in offering third party customers the products and services of the new payments platform it is building.
Apart from the activity with its own customers, the companies in the PagoNxt portfolio already have some external operations depending on their degree of maturity and the depth of their offer, but Santander sees 2021 as a key year to expand these services. The aim is to reach individuals and companies that do not currently work with the bank, but also other banks that choose to connect to the platform’s infrastructures to offer their own services.
Payments, the future
«Although payments have always been a key part of our strategy, PagoNxt is one of Santander’s three priorities for the future,» said Ana Botín, the group’s chairwoman, during the presentation of the annual results. Within the bank’s organisational structure and the division of roles between the chairwoman and CEO José Antonio Álvarez, PagoNxt will be a business unit reporting to Botín.
The payments platform, together with the implementation of the new One Santander operating model and the merger of Consumer and Openbank, will be key to achieving one of Santander’s major commitments to the market: to be able to offer its investors ordinary returns of up to 15% in the medium term.
PagoNxt, a project that started a year and a half ago and already has a staff of more than 1,400 employees, will focus on three areas: payment solutions for merchants, international business, and products and services for individuals. The latter, however, will play a lesser role in this first phase.
The bank wants to leverage its scale and technology to position itself in a large and fast-growing market. International trade and business payments activities alone account for 430 billion in revenues.
PagoNxt will be a standalone company, which Santander sees as one of the world’s largest fintechs and will operate in «parallel» to the bank, Botín said at the results presentation. The group has committed to the market to specify in the coming months the steps it will take to do so and how the announced IPO of Getnet Brasil fits into these plans. This payments company for merchants will debut on the Carioca stock exchange this year.
«We will combine Getnet Brazil with Getnet’s global platform and, eventually, the assets of Wirecard,» said Botín.
«We want to create a product factory that will be the cornerstone of a series of value-added services related to payment processing. To do this, we need all assets to be bundled together. Over the last five years, we have created assets that we have proven to work and we want to take them to the next level. To do that, they need to be on a global platform, where we can leverage our scale, with 147 million customers,» he said.
Brands
Within the retail solutions area, Getnet is the main asset. In Brazil, its market share has grown in three years from 12% to 15%, with a weight of up to 22% in e-commerce. In Europe, this activity will be boosted by the new assets of Wirecard, the German company that went bankrupt in the summer.
In international business, the flagship assets are Ebury, One Trade, Payments Hub and Mercury. Superdigital and PagoFX are the reference brands in the retail segment.
Source: Expansión.
