{"id":55985,"date":"2026-07-16T11:49:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T11:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/55985\/"},"modified":"2026-07-16T11:49:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T11:49:00","slug":"revolut-vs-banco-santander-the-battle-for-us-neobanking-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/55985\/","title":{"rendered":"Revolut vs. Banco Santander: The Battle for US Neobanking"},"content":{"rendered":"

Home<\/a> Commentary<\/a> What if Revolut Isn\u2019t the Only Threat? How Santander Is Quietly Targeting the US<\/p>\n

Europe’s financial innovators are arriving in the US from more than one direction.<\/p>\n

After moving to Spain from Los Angeles in January of last year, I quickly realized that much of the innovation in finance is happening in Europe. Meaning the seismic shifts in how consumers manage and spend money in their day-to-day lives.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

U.K.-based fintech Revolut filed for a U.S. bank charter with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. recently and expects to establish a banking presence there next year, complete with high-yield savings and checking accounts; access to stablecoins, multi-currency deposits; trading in stocks and crypto; and access to ATM networks (no physical branches).\u00a0<\/p>\n

But as much as JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon\u00a0seems<\/a> to\u2014all at once\u2014love, respect, and envy Revolut, I\u2019m not so sure the banking and fintech establishments are quite ready for the neobank\u2019s full-scale entry into the U.S.<\/p>\n

Enter Santander<\/p>\n

As much as\u00a0I believe<\/a>\u00a0Revolut \u2014 not to mention bunq \u2014 are building the future of finance in the U.S.\u00a0from Europe, another, less-discussed name could present a significant challenge.\u00a0Put another way: You can\u2019t talk about neobanks upending personal finance in the U.S. without bringing Banco Santander SA into the conversation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fintechs alone may not be the most meaningful competitive challenge to U.S. banks, in other words.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Understanding why starts with one of the first questions Revolut skeptics and banking incumbents around the world love to float: Can a company become a primary financial relationship without being a major loan underwriter?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s difficult for a fintech to build a lending business,\u00a0Felipe Pe\u00f1acoba Martinez<\/a>, CEO of Getnet Platforms Payments Hub (a Santander company) and former CIO at Revolut Bank (EU), told\u00a0Global Finance. \u201cRevolut is aware this takes time,\u201d he said, \u201cand they\u2019re going slower than in other areas.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Despite serving tens of millions of customers globally and holding roughly\u00a0$67 billion\u00a0in customer balances, Revolut\u2019s loan book remains a fraction of that figure. Then again, its consumer lending business is also growing rapidly: up\u00a0120%\u00a0year over year to $2.9 billion, according to the company\u2019s 2025 report.\u00a0<\/p>\n

By banking standards, Revolut\u2019s loan-to-deposit ratio remains small, but its lending segment is no longer theoretical. What matters is whether fintechs can scale banking capabilities faster than banks can scale digital ecosystems.<\/p>\n

Pe\u00f1acoba Martinez points to his own children, all three of whom use Revolut and don\u2019t have a need the company can\u2019t serve. \u201cBig banks are seeing how neobanks are taking market share, especially among younger generations,\u201d he says, and as these users eventually seek mortgages and more complex investment products, Revolut wants to serve those needs.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

At day\u2019s end, lending conveniently trotted out as a competitive obstacle is the kind of question keepers of the status quo ask when confronted with disruptive business models.\u00a0Radio\u00a0people dismissed streaming. Early Amazon.com Inc. skeptics pointed to the online retailer\u2019s lack of\u00a0profitability. Blockbuster\u00a0Video scoffed\u00a0at a $50 million offer to buy Netflix Inc. History is full of established players evaluating the future through the lens of the present.<\/p>\n

The lending question becomes more useful as a lens than a verdict. Is it easier for fintechs to build the lending, deposits, and infrastructure traditionally associated with banks? Or is it easier for banks to build the customer experiences, payment capabilities, and digital ecosystems that make fintechs disruptive?<\/p>\n

The Openbank Advantage<\/p>\n

Santander\u2019s advantage goes beyond its balance sheet. Through Openbank,\u00a0Getnet, and its broader\u00a0technology transformation efforts, the bank appears to be assembling many of the same capabilities fintechs spent years developing from scratch and combining them with infrastructure that many challengers still outsource or access through partners.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Traditional banks realize the threat from fintechs like Revolut and need to act, said Pe\u00f1acoba Martinez, but the challenge lies in execution.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe all know we need to build a modern tech stack that\u2019s easy to integrate, but how do you do that?\u201d he added. \u201cBuilding is easy, but decades of history, legacy systems, and mindsets are the hard part. It\u2019s very complex for incumbents due to time. Every year that passes, the situation is worse. The risk of breaking something is a greater challenge for big banks than for fintechs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inside Santander, the approach has been to prove new systems internally before scaling them more broadly. As Pe\u00f1acoba Martinez described it, the challenge isn\u2019t simply building something new; it\u2019s continuing to improve it after launch. Payments became the first testing ground at Santander, with roughly\u00a070%\u00a0of group payments now running through Getnet.<\/p>\n

The same logic applies to Openbank. Santander Executive Chair Ana Bot\u00edn has made clear that she wants the platform to reach\u00a0tens of millions of accounts\u00a0in the coming years as \u201ca digital bank with branches,\u201d including in the U.S.<\/p>\n

When I asked Pe\u00f1acoba Martinez if these efforts effectively place Santander in direct competition with Revolut, his answer was straightforward: yes.<\/p>\n

For all the attention paid to Revolut\u2019s\u00a02027\u00a0full-scale launch in the U.S., one of the more consequential battles may involve two companies moving toward similar destinations from opposite directions.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lifestyle Brands vs. Global Banks<\/p>\n

One is a fintech building bank capabilities\u00a0but marketing itself as a lifestyle brand; the other, a global bank adopting the mindset of a fintech while leveraging advantages fintechs have yet to replicate. The lesson for incumbents in the U.S. and around the world: neither of these models exists in isolation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Revolut, Santander, bunq, Nubank, and others are part of a broader wave of foreign challengers attempting to capture market share in the world\u2019s most lucrative banking market.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Having helped build products inside Revolut and now helping modernize a global banking group, Pe\u00f1acoba Martinez has seen both journeys firsthand. Listening to him describe them, one conclusion becomes difficult to ignore: time tends to help one side and hurt the other.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Like a young athlete, fintechs have room to grow aggressively from scratch; they don\u2019t think about limits. For older players, every year increases the pressure to keep up without breaking what they have already established.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no question that the competitive threat to U.S. finance from abroad is real. What remains murky is whether U.S. banks truly appreciate how many directions it\u2019s coming from.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rocco Pendola is a contributing correspondent based in Spain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Home Commentary What if Revolut Isn\u2019t the Only Threat? How Santander Is Quietly Targeting the US Europe’s financial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48203,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[121],"tags":[144,21384,21385,284],"class_list":["post-55985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-banco-santander","tag-banco-santander","tag-neobanks","tag-revolut","tag-santander"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55985\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}