# Banco Santander: AI agents, dated Source: https://www.bankingnewsai.com/banks/santander/ai-agents Record last changed: Oct 26, 2026 8 dated AI-agent moves from Jan 20, 2026 to Oct 19, 2026; 5 agent use cases on the profile, 2 in production. Strategy page: https://www.bankingnewsai.com/banks/santander ## Agent use cases | Use case | Stage | What it does | |---|---|---| | **Process-automation agents** | In production | More than 280 agents in production helping automate manual tasks and end-to-end workflows in credit, fraud, KYC and operations. | | **AI in software development** | In production | 17,000 people used agentic AI in software development in May 2026 and 40% of all code in June 2026 was developed by AI; the 2025 annual report cites over 6,000 developers using coding agents. | | **Agentic payments with Mastercard Agent Pay and Getnet** | Pilot | A live Europe-first agent-executed payment in a controlled environment (pilot stage) and Getnet infrastructure for merchants to accept AI-agent-initiated payments, including a first case in Mexico. | | **Agentic purchases with Visa Intelligent Commerce (Latin America)** | Pilot | Controlled pilot transactions in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay in which AI agents bought books and, in Brazil, chocolates within defined consent parameters. | | **A2K protocol for governed agent access to knowledge** | Announced | An open specification from Santander AI Lab for agents to resolve which knowledge bases they may use and to consume them with citations, access decisions and audit data, with Python reference packages; Santander has not said whether it runs in production. | ## Timeline ### Oct 2026 | Date | Move | Stage | Source | |---|---|---|---| | 2026-10-19 | **NVIDIA: Model Arena, specialised models and a three-year collaboration framework** Santander AI Lab built Model Arena to evaluate open-weight models against banking tasks, specialises models with NVIDIA NeMo Customizer, uses NVIDIA Kumo models for structured data and runs inference in its own architecture with NVIDIA Dynamo-Triton; in selected experimental use cases serving costs fell from around €5 to approximately €0.03 per interaction. A new three-year framework with NVIDIA covers foundation models, AI agents, fraud and AML, real-time decisioning and simulation including a banking digital twin. | Pilot | [Banco Santander newsroom, Oct 19, 2026](https://www.santander.com/en/press-room/press-releases/2026/10/santander-builds-ai-capabilities-that-improve-performance-and-lower-costs-using-nvidia-ai-infrastructure) | ### Sep 2026 | Date | Move | Stage | Source | |---|---|---|---| | 2026-09-23 | **Santander AI Lab launches A2K, a protocol for agent-to-knowledge access** An open specification, running over MCP, A2A and HTTPS, that lets enterprise AI agents discover, select, query, cite, audit and reconcile knowledge bases with scoped authority and lifecycle management. | Announced | [Banco Santander (archived copy of 24 September 2026; original page offline as of 26 October 2026) newsroom, Sep 23, 2026](https://web.archive.org/web/20260924165103/https://www.santander.com/en/stories/a2k-a-new-protocol-for-connecting-ai-agents-to-governed-auditable-enterprise-knowledge) | ### Jun 2026 | Date | Move | Stage | Source | |---|---|---|---| | 2026-06-09 | **Getnet infrastructure for AI agent-initiated payments** Getnet, Santander's merchant payments platform, launches infrastructure for merchants to accept payments initiated by AI agents, and with Mastercard and Neivor completes the first real-world case in Mexico and Latin America using Mastercard Agent Pay. | Pilot | [Banco Santander newsroom, Jun 9, 2026](https://www.santander.com/en/press-room/press-releases/2026/06/getnet-develops-infrastructure-that-enables-businesses-to-accept-ai-agent-initiated-payments) | | 2026-06-03 | **Group signs AI memorandum with G42** Covers AI-enabled advisory and savings, a banking intelligence layer and agentic financial services, with G42's Inception and Presight; definitive agreements are still to be signed. | Announced | [Banco Santander newsroom, Jun 3, 2026](https://santander.com/en/press-room/press-releases/2026/06/banco-santander-and-g42-sign-memorandum-of-understanding-to-explore-strategic-cooperation-in-artificial-intelligence) | ### Mar 2026 | Date | Move | Stage | Source | |---|---|---|---| | 2026-03-12 | **Visa Intelligent Commerce pilot in five Latin American markets** Santander completes controlled agentic purchases in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay with Visa Intelligent Commerce (books in four markets, chocolates in Brazil), described as the first end-to-end AI-agent payments in Latin America. | Pilot | [Banco Santander newsroom, Mar 12, 2026](https://santander.com/en/press-room/press-releases/2026/03/santander-and-visa-deliver-latin-americas-first-end-to-end-payments-powered-by-ai-agents) | | 2026-03-02 | **Europe's first live agentic payment with Mastercard** Santander and Mastercard complete a live end-to-end payment executed by an AI agent using Mastercard Agent Pay, in a controlled environment through Santander's live payments infrastructure; Finextra reports it is still a pilot, not a commercial rollout. | Pilot | [Banco Santander newsroom, Mar 2, 2026](https://santander.com/content/dam/santander-com/en/documentos/notas-de-prensa/2026/03/np-2026-03-02-santander-y-mastercard-completan-el-primer-pago-real-ejecutado-por-un-agente-de-ia-en-europa-en.pdf) | ### Feb 2026 | Date | Move | Stage | Source | |---|---|---|---| | 2026-02-25 | **Investor day: more than EUR 1bn of AI business value by 2028** Data and AI are called a key lever of ONE Transformation, contributing around one percentage point of cost-to-income improvement; Bloomberg reports about EUR 300m of extra revenue and about EUR 700m of lower costs, with agentic commerce and 'primacy with customers' among the levers. | Announced | [Banco Santander newsroom, Feb 25, 2026](https://santander.com/en/press-room/press-releases/2026/02/2026-santander-investor-day) | ### Jan 2026 | Date | Move | Stage | Source | |---|---|---|---| | 2026-01-20 | **Getnet sets out its agentic-commerce strategy** With a report by Monitor Deloitte, Getnet describes agent identification and validation, standardised APIs for agent-initiated payments and interoperability with industry protocols, building on its Single Entry Point API; it cites estimates that agentic AI will influence up to 30% of global e-commerce value by 2030. | Pilot | [Banco Santander newsroom, Jan 20, 2026](https://santander.com/en/press-room/press-releases/2026/01/getnet-outlines-its-agentic-commerce-strategy-as-ai-is-set-to-influence-30-of-global-e-commerce-by-2030) | --- Canonical page: https://www.bankingnewsai.com/banks/santander/ai-agents Part of [BankingNewsAI](https://www.bankingnewsai.com/). Every row is a dated, sourced entry on a bank profile on this site; the stage is the one the bank describes. Index of Markdown pages: https://www.bankingnewsai.com/llms.txt.