Team size: 8 in the team, 49 in the Sustainability network across the bank

Can you discuss your or your company’s efforts relating to renewability, sustainability, or other environmentally-friendly activities?

My work in Santander is aimed to help people and businesses prosper while contributing to global challenges as a financial institution. I have led the Sustainability Strategy in four of the five largest banks in Mexico. Currently at Santander, in my role as the first Chief Sustainability Officer, we have a robust strategy aimed at: Financial Inclusion, helping clients in their transition to a low-carbon business model, supporting climate innovation and reducing our own operations’ footprint. As a financial institution, the largest percentage of our environmental footprint is in our loan and investment portfolio. Therefore, we offer clients different financial products to help them transition and reduce the environmental footprint of their business, such as a green mortgage for individuals, but also green loans, green bonds and sustainability-linked products that can include ESG performance KPIs that we monitor during the duration of the loan. We have also established a robust set of policies and norms to manage the environmental risks, such as sectorial policies to reduce our footprint in the aviation, construction, cement, energy and oil and gas sectors. Every banking executive is trained in these policies, and we conduct due diligence and engagement in clients to understand their advancement in their sustainability strategy. We have objectives to reduce our emissions in these sectors, as well as objectives on sustainable financing towards 2030, plus a Net Zero target towards 2050. More than 50% of the bonds we structured for clients were labeled as green, social or sustainable, having an important share of the Mexican labeled bond market in Mexico. We are part of the Net Zero banking Alliance and the Principles for Responsible Banking, both initiatives part of the United Nations Environment Program – Finance Initiative (UNEP-FI)

Last year we created the new “Reto Santander Sostenible”, a challenge for climate entrepreneurs where we gave out a million pesos to the winners of the first edition of this challenge. The winning projects were related to plastics and to sustainable agriculture. We reviewed more than 110 climate projects through a panel of expert jurors, composed of climate and entrepreneurship experts as well as venture capital experts.

We have also transitioned on the topic of transparency, to disclose our sustainability data integrated to our financial data, as a best practice in ESG reporting. Our 2024 Annual Integrated Report marks a new era in integrating all the bank´s data in one report. We have been publishing a Sustainability Report since before 2010 and we have automated and systematized the management of the social and environmental data, which allows us to monitor our performance year on year.