Santander switches on Getnet across Europe from October — and British businesses are squarely in its sights
The Hispano-Luso Report
To millions of Britons, Santander is the branch on the corner and the red flame on the debit card. What almost none of them know is what the Spanish group is preparing to do across the Channel. From October, according to reporting in Expansión, Santander will deploy Getnet — its payments platform — simultaneously across more than 30 European countries where it already holds licences. Not a cautious market-by-market rollout: one switch, flipped continent-wide.
For a bank so embedded in British daily life, the story has received strikingly little English-language attention. It deserves more, because the businesses Getnet is being built for include a very large number of British ones.
What is Getnet?
Getnet is Santander’s merchant acquiring and payments business — the infrastructure that sits between a customer’s card and a company’s bank account. Born in Brazil, which remains its largest market by payment volume, it currently operates in Europe only in Spain and Portugal, where it has grown into the second-largest acquirer with a client share above 20% in both countries — the fastest-growing payments entity in either market over the past five years.
Until roughly a year ago, Getnet had a structural limitation: it served only companies that banked with Santander. That has changed. The firm has built its own infrastructure that decouples the payments service from the bank account entirely, opening it to companies that bank elsewhere, to technology platforms, to management software providers and to payment facilitators. Santander sources quoted by Expansión describe that decoupling as the key that unlocks the European expansion — and it is also what makes Getnet relevant to businesses with no Santander relationship at all.
The pitch to British merchants
The European launch will not replicate the physical-terminal business Getnet runs in Iberia. It is built squarely for e-commerce and large multinationals, processing international card schemes alongside the main local payment methods of each European market — the Dutch shopper’s preferred rails, the German one’s, the Polish one’s — through a single provider and a single integration.
Any British company selling into the EU will recognise the problem that pitch addresses. Since Brexit, cross-border trade has meant friction at every layer, and payments fragmentation is one of them: different acquirers, different local methods, different contracts, market by market. The single-integration solution has traditionally meant signing with one of the large American processors that dominate European e-commerce acquiring. Santander’s bet is that a bank British businesses already know — and in many cases already bank with — can win that mandate instead, leaning on relationships built over years by its corporate and investment banking arm.
The rollout begins with small local teams in France and Italy, the priority markets, before extending to Belgium and the Nordics. The template is the hub Getnet built in Asia, staffed with Chinese-speaking professionals to serve clients there — an operation that has grown to support Latin America too, and whose client roster includes e-commerce giants Temu and Shein. As Santander sources put it, even the biggest clients like to deal in their own language — a sentiment this publication can only endorse.
The AI transaction that actually happened
Buried in Expansión’s reporting is the detail most likely to travel: last March, Santander and Mastercard completed the first real payment executed by an AI agent in Europe. Not a sandbox demonstration or a slide-deck concept — a live transaction, run on an architecture Getnet has built to incorporate the main agentic AI protocols, with clients able to use whichever are available in their geography.
Agentic commerce — software agents that browse, decide and pay on a customer’s behalf — is the theme every payments conference is currently promising. Santander has quietly built the rails and run the first train. The bank itself is measured about adoption, noting that mass uptake will depend as much on consumer trust as on technology. But for a story about a payments launch, it is a remarkable proof point, and Getnet backs it with a dedicated ten-person AI team whose deployed use cases already include predictive models that anticipate terminal failures before they happen.
The numbers underneath
Payments is one of the five global business lines into which Santander reorganised itself three years ago, and the division is earning its place: first-quarter profit of €20 million, up 340% year on year. Getnet’s Latin American footprint was recently completed with launches in Peru and Colombia; Brazil leads the group in payment volume, followed by Spain, Portugal and Mexico. Europe is the missing continent — hence October.
There is a quietly satisfying historical note here, too. Santander’s original acceleration in European payments leaned on technology assets acquired from Wirecard, the German processor whose collapse remains the continent’s most notorious fintech scandal. The group has since reoriented entirely around a platform of its own — and it is that proprietary system, not the Wirecard inheritance, powering the October launch.
What the English-language coverage missed
At the time of writing, this story exists only in Spanish. That is a familiar pattern for corporate Spain, but it is particularly striking here: a bank with 14 million UK customers, launching a product aimed at precisely the cross-border merchants Britain produces in volume, covered nowhere in the British business press. For UK companies weighing their European payments stack, for fintech watchers tracking who actually ships agentic commerce rather than talking about it, and for anyone following how Spain’s biggest bank is repositioning itself, this is one to bookmark before it surfaces in English elsewhere.
Santander’s playbook lately has been to move quietly and let the numbers speak — much as Telefónica and Pontegadea are doing with the Telxius sale we covered earlier this week. Corporate Spain is in a repositioning mood. The anglophone press just hasn’t noticed yet.
The Hispano-Luso Report tracks the Iberian business stories that anglophone coverage overlooks. Source: Expansión (Matteo Allievi, 21 July 2026).
