Speaker 1:
From the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, welcome Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange is your go-to for the latest on markets, leadership, vision, and business. For over 230 years, the NYSE has been the beating heart of global growth. Each week, we bring you inspiring stories of innovators, job creators, and the movers and shakers of capitalism here at the NYSE and ICE's exchanges around the world. Now let's go Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Kristen Scholer.
Kristen Scholer:
The worlds of banking and golf, while seemingly disparate, share a fundamental connection rooted in service, trust, and adaptation. Both industries rely heavily on relationship-building with clients, patrons, fans, and caddies, emphasizing the importance of understanding and meeting needs and wants. Just as golfers must adapt their techniques and strategies to navigate diverse courses and conditions, banks must evolve their services and technologies to keep pace with changing expectations and market dynamics.
Innovation in both realms is essential to remain competitive and relevant. High-tech, golf clubs, swing analysis tools, and data-driven performance metrics have transformed how players train and compete. Similarly, digital banking platforms, mobile applications, AI, and data analytics are reshaping the banking landscape, forcing companies to adjust from traditional methods. Santander Group NYSE, ticker symbol SAN, has embraced innovation and expansion, growing from a primarily European presence to entering the United States in 2010. Over the last 15 years, the bank's presence in North America has steadily grown, and now with the launch of OpenBank throughout the country, its US market presence is poised to increase even further.
Santander Executive Chair, Ana Botin, one of two guests today, has been leading the bank's growth and expansion since September 2014. With more than 160 million customers and greater than 200,000 employees, Santander Group is one of the most profitable and efficient banks around the world. Alongside Ana is two-time major championship winning golfer and Santander global ambassador, Jon Rahm. Like Santander, Jon has competed and succeeded globally with origins in Spain, but a strong presence in the United States.
Today, Ana and Jon join us Inside the ICE House to discuss Santander's US expansion and the challenges of entering a new territory and competing to be the best. We will detail the impact that golf has had on both of their lives, demand for innovation in what they do, and the launch of OpenBank, Santander's new national digital offering in the United States. Our conversation with Ana Botin, Executive Chair of Santander Group, and Jon Rahm, two-time major championship-winning golfer, is coming up right after this.
Speaker 3:
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Kristen Scholer:
Welcome back. Remember to subscribe wherever you listen and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts so that others know where to find us. You can also now find full video episodes of the Inside the Icehouse podcast on tv.nyse.com and on the NYSE YouTube channel. Why have one VIP join us Inside the Icehouse when you can have two? Ana Botin is the Executive Chair of Santander Group and has held this position since September 2014. Today, Santander serves over 160 million customers across Europe and the Americas and has over 200,000 employees.
Joining Ana is two-time major championship-winning golfer and Santander global ambassador, Jon Rahm. Jon in 2023 won the Masters and in 2021 won the US open at Torrey Pines. Ana, Jon, welcome Inside the Icehouse. Ana, you've had a full day here in Manhattan from addressing employees around the globe at a company-wide town hall to preparing to ring the closing bell here at the New York Stock Exchange. After speaking to the entire Santander team, what key message did you try to convey about the current state of the bank?
Ana Botín:
It's great to be here. Thank you for asking me to join you. Today is a very important day for Santander, not just in the US, but globally. Launching OpenBank nationwide across the United States, it's a big milestone. It's the first time we'll be able to serve the US consumers across the whole country beyond our footprint. OpenBank is a very successful digital bank in Europe. It's the largest digital bank by deposits. And we are very excited, because we are beginning with what I say is the best high-yield savings account in America. It's fast, simple, and has a very competitive rate. And importantly, and you said it, it's backed by a bank that has the trust of 168 million customers. So it's a very, very important milestone for Santander today.
Kristen Scholer:
Jon, just a few months after your Master's victory in 2023, you were named Santander's new global ambassador, an exciting and eventful time. What drew you to the opportunity of representing the bank?
Jon Rahm:
Well, for the listeners that don't know, both the bank, Ana, myself are all from Spain. So up until that point in my career, I had never had the luxury of having a Spanish sponsor. So to be able to join one of the biggest banks in the world and now today to be here in the launch of OpenBank, the biggest online bank in the world, is quite special. It's one of those things that, as an athlete, you don't ever think is going to happen, but that's life and that's where it's taken me. And Santander's had a very long-standing relationship, not only with golf, but with sports, and the fact that they put their trust in me to continue that tradition is quite special.
Kristen Scholer:
I want to talk more about this partnership. Ana, what made Jon the perfect person to represent Santander and OpenBank for the years to come?
Ana Botín:
As Jon has said, we have always been very keen to sponsor sports. We have sponsored different Formula One, also golf, football, of course. Being from Spain, we sponsor the La Liga and also Latin America. But Jon is very special, because as he has just said, he comes not just from Spain, but from Northern Spain, which is where Santander was born. So we're literally one hour apart. Bilbao and Santander are very close. And at the same time, he's very American. He lives in Arizona. He came to this country, he was telling me earlier, when he was 17.
By the way, I identify a lot with him, because I came to United States when I was 17 and I lived here until I was 30. I went to college, I worked at JP Morgan. So we share a lot of the same values in terms of culture and how we think about how we do things, which for me is incredibly important, but he also has the winning mentality and I can do whatever I try or propose myself to do if I work hard enough and practice and all that.
So, in a way, this is how we see Santander. We are ready to play in the major leagues. We believe we can add value to consumers across the United States. Same way as Jon is appealing, not just to global, but very importantly to the US consumers. And especially we're interested in the younger generation, which obviously he represents.
Kristen Scholer:
Ana, I want to stick with you here. Alongside your visit to Manhattan for the bell ringing here at the New York Stock Exchange and addressing Santander employees, you're also here to mark the launch, as you've noted, of OpenBank in the United States, a significant milestone in the company's 15-year journey in the country. Walk us through how Santander has evolved since entering the United States retail and commercial banking market in 2010 leading up to this major milestone.
Ana Botín:
As you well said, what's different about Santander as a foreign bank in the United States is that we are in the consumer market. Most foreign banks have traditionally competed at the higher end in the corporate bank, we also have a business there, but 70% of Santander, and actually 70% of Santander US, is focused on auto lending. We're the fifth-largest auto lender in the United States. By the way, we're the number one in Europe, number one in LATAM. So we know what we are doing when we make car loans.
And the other side of that, of course, is the bank. So we bought a bank, we've turned around the bank. We have 2 million customers in our footprint in the Northeast. And what's differential, what's going to change from today is that we are going to be able to offer our banking product to all Americans. And that is a huge step forward for us. It will allow us to grow beyond our footprint and it will allow us also to improve our business. Because as we replace what today is partly wholesale funding with high-yield savings, that is good for our P&L, as well as being a very attractive product for our customers, our consumers.
Kristen Scholer:
Jon, I want to bring you in here. Santander's entry into the United States happened just a couple of years before your own transition to the country and your enrollment, as Ana mentioned, at Arizona State University. So looking back on your four years as a student athlete in Tempe, Arizona, what were some of the biggest challenges that you faced in adapting to the culture both on and off the course?
Jon Rahm:
I would say the golf course is always going to be the simplest part of a change like that, because the game doesn't really change that much. It might be hard to believe by hearing me speak now, but the number one change was the language, obviously. I thought I could speak decent English back in Spain, but I was very far from the truth. I must say, a lot of what we learned is UK English and maybe UK slang. So having never been in the US prior to arriving for the first time, there's a lot of little things and just little sentences that I just wouldn't understand. There was a lot that would get lost in translation literally. So it was a solid two months before I thought, "Okay, I think I have a decent handle on things."
And trying to get through classes with that was difficult. Early on, my professors were very understanding. My head coach always tells a story that I was so clueless at first that he didn't think I was going to make it past two weeks, let alone graduate and have a four-year successful career on and off the golf course. So that language barrier was the most difficult one. And then I think, as you grow as a person, just trying to understand the differences in the culture, the differences in a country like the US. Spain is relatively small. I think when I left we were maybe 50 million people in population. The US being much larger, much more diverse in that sense. So there was a lot of things I had to learn, I would say, culturally to be properly integrated.
I always say the same thing, which is, first year I was in school, didn't understand a lot of jokes. A lot of conversations I wasn't really a part of, because I didn't fully understand. Second year, I started understanding. And it wasn't until my third year, junior year, where I had the confidence to start making some jokes within my group of friends, and now it's a group of friends, just because I felt like it took that long to get an idea of what the US was like and what is considered correct to say and correct not to say, because it does change drastically from country to country. So if it changes from state to state, we can imagine what the differences is in country. So adaptation to a new world, which would feel like a new world to me, is the biggest. But the language, obviously, being the biggest change.
Kristen Scholer:
You seem pretty comfortable now.
Jon Rahm:
I am. Well, after 12 years, American wife, three American children. I think she said it earlier, to say 50% American, I think it's slowly creeping over the 50% mark at this point. My life is based here. Very few people guess I'm not American when they hear me and they meet me for the first time, because it's also not the most Spanish sounding name in the world, unless you say my second last name, which is Rodriguez, and then at that point-
Ana Botín:
Oh, my god.
Jon Rahm:
You get it?
Ana Botín:
Absolutely.
Jon Rahm:
But Jon Rahm doesn't scream Spanish. So it's definitely been, so far, a very interesting transition.
Ana Botín:
If I may say something here, I so much sympathize with Jon when he said that he had learned English, but it was more UK. I had the opposite experience. I lived in United States from 17 to 30, so I thought I understand the Brits. I got sent many years later to run Santander UK. I was CEO of our bank there. And for the first three months I thought I was in a different planet, because the English don't think the same, they don't speak the same. They say something, they mean something totally different. And I was American English at this point, and actually I had to learn faster than three years, because after three months I figured out that when an Englishman tells you at the meeting, "Oh, that is really interesting," it means that's rubbish, and so on. So it was a total culture shock. Same language, but very different. So I very much sympathize with your experience.
Kristen Scholer:
Sounds like an adjustment. Ana, in those early years of bringing Santander's retail and commercial banking business to the US, what challenges did you encounter in introducing the brand and educating the market about everything that the bank has to offer?
Ana Botín:
The challenge for us, this was a regional bank that did not do very well, that's why we were able to buy it, and that's putting it mildly. So it was clear to us we could not compete just by letting the regional bank continue doing the same thing. First we had to make sure we run the bank to our standards. That took quite a few years. By 2017, 2018, 2019, when that was achieved, we realized that unless we brought Santander Group's global scale to benefit our US operation, we would not be able to compete.
What do I mean by that? Every company plays to their strengths. What are our strengths vis-a-vis others is we have a global scale and in-market scale. So how could we combine those two to really have a profitable and growing business in United States? On the auto side, we brought our OEM relationships, auto manufacturers, so Hyundai, Mitsubishi, who work with us in Europe, they came with us to United States. So that is something which has been hugely helpful.
On the funding side is what we're just doing today. We said, "Okay, if we want to reduce the cost to serve, a major competitive advantage in today's digital world is being the low cost to serve producer." That means I can give you as a customer a much better deal. If I can build, as I have, my own back and front end platform, cloud-based, native, which is what we have, our tech stack is ours, built by us, I don't have to outsource this. If I don't have to outsource to all the tech players, I get 20%, 30% better prices. Of course, it has to be world-class. So what we did was, "Okay, we've built a great tech stack. Let me prove it's world-class." And we did that. We went out and said, "Okay, who wants to sell this?" Not just for my Santander banks, but to others. So we partnered with Google. So our backend, our core system, we have [inaudible 00:18:13] with Google who will now offer it to other banks globally.
So, again, our strategy here was use my competitive advantages of global and market scale to benefit the auto, to benefit the deposit takers, so I can actually, building my own tech platform is... I built a factory, which is my tech stack, not just for the United States. I built my factory for 168 million customers. Very few banks in the world have that capacity. That would make us the second-largest bank in the United States by number of customers. Again, that's a tech stack I will deploy, not just in the US, but in all my other markets. And as I said, Google will offer it to other banks.
Kristen Scholer:
It's impressive.
Ana Botín:
So this is really what's different about Santander from other European banks.
Kristen Scholer:
Admittedly, turning to the subject of golf, I am not a golfer myself. I know both of you are. Jon, we'll turn the conversation back to you. I have been fascinated by both the professional and amateur athletes in their given sports. And as an outside observer, at least when it comes to golf, I would think that in Spain sports like soccer, with clubs like Barcelona and Real Madrid, and even basketball, with stars like Marc and Pau Gasol dominating the headlines, how were you first introduced to golf?
Jon Rahm:
I think putting any other sport but football and you're in Spain dominating headlines, it's a hard sell, because if you were to live there and see the newspapers, it's the only thing that matters sports-wise in that country. Basketball is second, but there's a large margin in between. And the occasional, luckily, tennis player that we've had that is very successful, being Rafa now and now Carlos. So I'm pretty sure every single one of my friends growing up wanted to be a football player. Every single one. I played football growing up. It's the easiest sport for all of us to access. All you need is a ball and somebody to play with and you're good to go. Golf can be hard to access.
And my family, it's a little bit of an unusual story, because nobody had ever stepped on a golf course or thought of golf until my dad tried it. I believe it was 1997, 1998. And the reason we started, it was because of an event played in Spain, in southern Spain, in Valderrama, called the Ryder Cup, which it's the best 12 Europeans versus the best 12 Americans played every two years. It can get pretty intense. So it was actually my dad's friends that were in that part of the country who heard about it, the Innova golf. That group of people was into rock climbing, skiing, hiking, paragliding. Very far from golf. All those things are very far from golf.
So they heard about it, decided to go watch it, thought it was impressive, because the event in itself is really, really fun. So when they got back home, they tried to convince their group of friends to start playing golf and that's how my dad started. And then he went, my mom joined. My older brother, who's six years older than me, joined. They would pick me up from school, go get their golf lesson, and eventually I tried it at the age of eight or nine years old.
I'll say at least most Spanish golfers that we know that have been successful either have a long relationship with golf, grew up near a golf course or on the golf course, something like that. Very few do you hear where nobody was ever related. I think it's a bit of an unusual story when it comes to this, but something that I guess was meant to be, because the second golf was introduced to my life, pretty quickly, every single other sport just started dropping off and it was a clear interest and a clear match for me, being something special compared to other sports.
Kristen Scholer:
Sticking with golf, Ana, you've mentioned lessons from five-time major champion Seve Ballesteros. When reflecting on your own golf journey, how did he and his teachings influence you on and off the course?
Ana Botín:
Yes, I was incredibly lucky, because he was my teacher. My mother tried to give us a very holistic education, so we had culture, sports, everything. So when I was literally eight years old, he basically crossed the bay and we used to hit balls against a net in a porch. Northern Spain, by the way, it was after school, dark. And it was like [foreign language 00:22:52], it's like a mat on the floor. Nothing very exciting for an eight-year-old. He was an amazing teacher. He ended up marrying my sister. It's a long story.
The thing I remember most about him, and we used to play some Pro-Ams before he turned, actually, just after he turned pro, and he was four or five years older than me, and I just remember how demanding he was on himself and on me. So I would go and play at Pro-Am and I was literally nine or 10 years old, and I would have a par and then I would have a bogey and he would say, "How can you do that? You're better than that." So he would constantly push you and push you to do better and be better.
So that is really my recollection. And, of course, we're discussing this earlier, he is known for the Seve Shot. When you do an impossible shot that you didn't think you could do, people still today call that a Seve Shot. And this is really what he was. He was somebody who never gave up, somebody who always gave the best of himself, because he was so talented and he worked very hard. He knew he could do things that others could never do or would never imagine he could do. So he was an incredible athlete and an incredible person.
Kristen Scholer:
It's wonderful to hear that. Jon, Seve leads a remarkable line of great Spanish golfers, including Miguel Ángel Jiménez, Sergio Garcia, and now yourself. What kind of pressure comes with continuing their legacy and how do you feel about expanding the game in Spain so that future generations of Spanish golfers can carry on that success?
Jon Rahm:
I wouldn't say so much pressure. It's absolutely, in a way, when you get to that point, almost a point of celebration. It's a gift to be able to be considered among those great players. In our case, especially being young in my career, I'm not actively thinking on the mark I may be having. I'm just trying to follow what some of the greats have done in front of me. I think a true mark of greatness is how you inspire the next generation. And luckily, in Spain, there's been somebody in all those generations that's been able to inspire the next. So, hopefully, with my play I can keep on doing it.
But something to focus on and is not that well known, when Seve turned pro, he grew up as a farmer and wasn't really a golfer on, and then earned his way into being a professional golfer, I believe there were 15,000 licensed golfers in Spain. At the time he passed away at the young age of I think around 50, 55, there were over 340,000 licensed golfers in Spain. The number of golf courses, multiplied by a factor, I don't even know, but how much he grew the game in his lifespan was absolutely incredible, even after he was retired.
So, not that I can reach those numbers, but if I can make an impact significant enough to improve the game and how much is played in Spain and the accessibility of the game in Spain, I think it would be quite special to be able to say that I did that in my career. Maybe not so much right now, because I'm still competing, but there'll be time in my life to then be able to do that. And, hopefully, if I keep doing well, inspire a new generation where the next great player may come along, or players, which I think might be in the future, where you get possibly more than one player who's able to win major championships, who's able to approach the top 10 or top five in the world at the same time. We haven't seen that since Seve and José María Olazábal were playing together, and hopefully this is something we see in the future.
Kristen Scholer:
We'll be watching. Ana, back to you and OpenBank. Already a leader in Europe as the largest 100% digital bank by deposits. What was the strategic rationale behind expanding to the US and what can American clients expect from the platform?
Ana Botín:
[inaudible 00:27:16] and we live for our clients, our customers, and this is a product which is aimed at consumers. The aim is to deliver what we have in Europe, which is a full service digital bank in your mobile, which, given our very powerful technology, you'll be able to open an account today. You can do that today. If you're quite fast in three minutes, we say four or five minutes. So open an account fast, get a very simple and fast high yield savings account. Again, backed by Santander, as I said before, with 168 million customers. But very importantly, you're going to get throughout 2025, by the end of 2025, you'll be able to have that full service bank up and running in United States.
Why is it important? Because we are launching in Mexico and we are connecting all our co-market across Europe and the Americas through instant payments. For example, I don't know if by the end of 2025, but sometime between 2025 and 2026, you could be able to open an account with OpenBank in the US and be able to make payments to and from Mexico, to and from some other European countries where we operate. So this is really differential. This is something which is not available today to the US consumer.
But again, it's a fast, simple, competitive rates, because we are a low cost producer. And remember, we are owned by our shareholders, and the only way you square this circle in today's world is building your own world-class technology. And we have done that and it works. So that's why we're very excited about being able to offer this to the US consumers across the whole country.
Kristen Scholer:
I want to talk more about that technology. OpenBank is built on Santander's proprietary technology platform, as you've referenced, which includes the award-winning, Gravity core banking infrastructure, and the intuitive ODS customer interface. How does this technology enable Santander and OpenBank to innovate more rapidly and effectively than competitors?
Ana Botín:
The key is, the competitors, whether it's big tech or the fintechs who have cloud native modern tech, that it gives you agility, that gives you the capacity to innovate, to improve the product every day. We have that. It's proven, because our customers love it. By the way, it's not just a bank. We've also partnered with Apple and actually Amazon in Germany, so you can actually finance purchases online. What's unique is that this comes with, as I've said before, we are a bank. We are highly regulated.
Our software, our processes, the way we treat your data, everything, it's built with a resiliency and security levels that are way higher than any of the purely tech or fintechs. By the way, they will at some point, many of them will end up becoming banks if they want to do banking, and that is something which I tell you now will happen sooner rather than later. Actually, many of them are applying for banking licenses.
Today, you have that unique combination, which is highly regulated, the trust that comes with that, it's not easy by the way. It makes us sometimes slower. And that's why we had to build this new tech. And that's why we built OpenBank on the side, because it's the go-to model for all what we call legacy banks. But I had to prove it worked with customers, with consumers, and this is super important. We've proven it works. Again, Europe is a very competitive market for banking, and I'm very confident that we will bring something different to the US consumer.
Kristen Scholer:
Let's stick with the theme of technology, but transition to technology in golf. Jon, this is where I want you to weigh in. We've seen a lot of innovation in the game of golf over the years, from club and ball designs to data analytics. How are these advancements impacting your game and how do you incorporate them into your training to stay ahead of your own competitors?
Jon Rahm:
Well, a lot like Ana has said, it's to be able to make a mark, it's again about self-improvement. So I think we're all in a constant chase of greatness in that sense and now become better. And in golf nowadays we're reaching, technologically, I think almost not a ceiling, but getting close to a ceiling, because of how much it's advanced the last 15 years, how much data's coming into the game of golf, how much people are analyzing each number and how much goes into the design, the engineering of golf balls, golf clubs, shoes, gloves, everything related to the golf swing. It's funny you mention it, they are actually looking into ways to slow this down a little bit, where people consider professional golfers hit the ball, the golf ball way too far right now because of the advancement.
Physically, you can only improve so much, there's been athletes before, but not too long ago we had wooden clubs. It's a big difference compared to what we have nowadays. So they're trying to set up limitations for golf balls to fly lower, to fly shorter, for golf clubs to actually also not hit the golf ball as far. So that's where a lot of the technology would come in. Because brands will somehow figure out to, within those limitations, still optimize what we can do. But aside from generalizing on the game, there are so many combinations that go into what I can do personally, from the shaft to the loft, which is the degrees of a club face, the angle that the shaft goes into the club face. So many little changes that can affect a game so massively. Luckily, I can rely on people that understand all of this a lot better than I can, because my job is to hit it, and they can actually tell me what's going on inside and outside the golf clubs.
But the single part that I would look at the most is statistics. What am I doing throughout the year? What are my trends? What I'm doing, what I'm doing wrong? What can I improve? And they get into about as much detail as anybody can get into, to where it can be too much information, if you're not careful. So my job at that point is to hopefully filter a lot of what's going on, because a lot of it is circumstantial on what's going on in a golf course and environment and the weather changes and things like that. But the applications are endless on what one can improve and what you can improve on your golf bag to improve other parts of your game that the statistics may say that you need to improve. So it's a bit of a balance in between what you want to improve within yourself and when you can improve physically and mentally, and what your clubs can help you without really having to change anything. So it's a bit of a balance that you need to work on to be able to apply both of them.
Kristen Scholer:
Ana, I want to turn back to OpenBank's launch here in the US and, of course, its impact on Santander's leading US auto lending business, as you referenced earlier, the focus in niche and auto lending. How do you envision the digital banking platform enhancing your already strong market share in this particular area?
Ana Botín:
As far as the benefits for our business, our consumer business for us consumer is auto plus the bank, the deposit taker, it delivers a very specific, immediate benefit, which is we substitute wholesale funding, which is more expensive, by high yield savings from retail customers. So that is a straight benefit to the bottom line. And that's really important, because we committed last year to investors that we would deliver by 2025 a 15% return on tangible equity in the United States, and this is going to be a very important part of delivering on that commitment.
Kristen Scholer:
And in terms of OpenBank, prior to that, we had seen Santander launch, its buy now, pay later platform, Zinia, in 2022. With modern banking increasingly becoming digital, we feel it in our everyday lives and, obviously, it's at the forefront of Santander, how are the combined technologies of Zinia and OpenBank positioning your bank, Santander, to meet the evolving customer needs and expectations?
Ana Botín:
It's absolutely essential. Zinia is a buy now, pay later. So if you go and buy, by the way, in a physical store, also in Europe, Germany or in a digital merchant, we actually have partnered with Apple and Amazon in Germany, it means that we need to be where you as a customer are going to be. And you and I, and all of us, Jon, we're more and more on our mobile. We shop online. So we need to be where you are shopping and you need to see Santander there. We are big enough and we have the global scale and the local leadership to build this product.
So we ensure that not just today, but down the road, you actually can bank with Santander, you can finance your purchases when you go onto the digital merchants with Santander. Zinia is our brand, so that's another brand. Yes, I know, too many brands maybe, but that's how the team works. They wanted to have a different brand. So OpenBank and Zinia go hand in hand. We haven't even discussed that, but by 2026, bringing Zinia to the United States is easy and fast. Very easy, because this is cloud native technology, it travels well. We work on AWS. So it's quite easy to actually make that happen. So we will be, from 2026 onwards, looking to partner with merchants across the United States so you can actually finance your purchases and eventually do other things with us through the merchants.
Kristen Scholer:
Well, evolution certainly is the name of the game here. And, Jon, that's why I want to bring you back in, because regarding these changing consumer trends, golf participation actually was on the decline until as recently as 2019, but has seen a resurgence since the COVID pandemic in 2020. So to avoid complacency and prevent another decline in participation, what steps do you think the sport should take to grow participation, viewership, and general interest?
Jon Rahm:
I think one of the biggest obstacles that golf always has to overcome is that bit of a asterisk of stigma that it has that at one point it was an elitist sport. It was only for the upper social classes. When, if you were to speak for the vast majority of professional golfers nowadays, none of us were upper class. It's middle to lower class for the most part. So I think getting that message across and having enough accessible golf facilities, golf courses, and even golf clubs, like rental clubs, I think is very important for the less fortunate to be able to go play, for example. And this is something I hope I can do in someday.
I grew up going to a driving range. Picture a Topgolf, way less nice. And instead of having all the pretty lights and all that, just the nets and a couple of flags just in grass. It looked like a pasture more than anything else. But you had a spot to hit balls. Entry was €1, which is slightly more than $1, and you could rent clubs for very, very cheap, and you could get golf balls for very, very cheap out of a machine. So for what would be about $5 to $10 worth of money, you could get endless amount of entertainment when it comes to golf, because you really didn't need to leave that area. If you didn't want to hit those golf balls into the range, which later they'll be retrieved and put back into the ball machine, you could go into the short game area and putt and chip and work in other parts of the game endlessly until it closed. There was no time limit.
That's how a lot of my time was spent when I was younger. And I think having easier access to golf, easier access to usable golf clubs that maybe you don't need to buy, because a full set of clubs is quite pricey. But being able to rent it and then being able to give it back, or simply, like you would do with bowling balls or you would do with other equipment, just leave your ID, or whatever it may be, and then when you leave, you leave the golf club and then you get your ID back, as simple as that, I think would be a great step into getting people into it. I think it's a small step into introducing golf into different communities and maybe from there picking it up to being something else.
Kristen Scholer:
Let's shift to Santander's philanthropic efforts. Ana, the bank is the largest private supporter of higher education globally with the Santander Open Academy offering more than a thousand courses to help leaders acquire the skills needed for better opportunities. What drives the company's commitment to higher education and why is it important to provide access to this content for everyone?
Ana Botín:
We believe, and I've said this many times, that education isn't everything, but it's almost everything. So we have a responsibility to our communities. We're global, but we are very much a community bank in many countries. So don't think of us as global complex transactions. That's not Santander. So we are very much embedded in the communities. We have people and branches across Europe and the Americas. And higher education is the main, but we also do other community work, including here in the United States. We believe education and access to education. We have the three E's. So it's education, entrepreneurship, and employability. The three E's, which is the way we think about our education program, is incredibly important. It connects us also to the younger generation, which is obviously key for us, because that's when you really engage with your customers.
But we've been doing this for 25 years, actually 27 years. During that period, we have contributed 2.3 billion, I think it's dollars or euros, $2.3 billion to all these different programs across our footprint. It's the way we chose to try to help communities. And it's very much linked, if you think about it, employability, entrepreneurship, to what a bank should do. When we think about what it is, why we are here, we think about helping people and businesses prosper. Helping you buy a house, helping you start a business. And at the end, having the right level of education and being prepared is absolutely essential. So we try to tie in our philanthropic focus to what our business is so we can actually make sense of this also for our shareholders.
Kristen Scholer:
Jon, I want to bring you in as well, because your charitable efforts have included opening a golf garden in Madrid for hospitalized children battling illness and donating funds for every birdie and eagle you made during tournaments to the Mexican Red Cross after the 2018 earthquake, among other initiatives. As a role model for many young golfers, how do you hope your own charitable work will influence and impact those both within and outside of the golf community?
Jon Rahm:
It's actually a question that I've been asking myself quite a bit, as wanting to start a foundation, what would I like to focus on? There's too many things. It's great to hear Ana speak about education, because it's something that my family has always valued. I promised my dad when I went to the US that I would graduate no matter what, when a lot of golfers nowadays you see leave early. So I promised I would stay all four years and graduate, which I did. My wife as well is somebody who values education a lot. So we could go down the route as well, providing means and ways for people to find a way to higher education and better prepare themselves in life, but there's so many different avenues.
Recently, with the hurricanes coming into Florida and North Carolina, my caddy being from North Carolina, we decided to do exactly what you just mentioned. This last week in a tournament in Spain, per birdie and eagle donate to a charity over there in any state that will be helping a lot of the people that are either standing in the mountains or need help because they may not have the insurances necessary for the damage that they've gone through, in the mountains and other parts of the country. So many different initiatives that I would like to be involved with.
The one you mentioned in Spain, it's a hospital in Madrid called Hospital del Niño Jesús, which I believe in Spain is the only... I think it's the only wing or the only sector focused on children with cancer. Almost like St. Jude where those kids don't have to pay for the treatment, they come in for their severity of their illness and they get the treatment that they need without having a bill. Besides being able to donate, would be a synthetic putting green, not only for them, for anybody in the hospital to be able to use and be able to be outside and do something within the limitations of what their treatment might be. Hopefully, be able to partner with them and their foundation, which is Aladina, which will be like Aladdin with an A at the end. They do great work with the hospital and many other situations.
But as somebody like myself who was born with a clubfoot... If you don't know what it is, look it up. It's something you don't find very often. But my right ankle and leg were all kinds of twisted when I was born. So being able to also focus on that route and maybe help people that are born physically a little bit different can help. There are opportunities in illness. But if it's all said and done and when I want to look back in my life, I definitely want to be able to think and see that I've made an impact somehow, somewhere outside of just golf. Luckily, I get the reach and the platform to be able to impact enough people that if I can do it outside the game of golf, it'll definitely be something I'm proud of.
Kristen Scholer:
We like to hear about that. So as we start to wrap up, Jon, I'm going to ask you about the Ryder Cup in 2025. It's going to be held that Bethpage Black, just about an hour drive from here at the New York Stock Exchange. Team Europe, which you were a part of in 2023, does aim to secure a back-to-back victory after defeating team USA in Rome. How does that victory rank among your career triumphs, and how much are you looking forward to defending the title on US soil next year?
Jon Rahm:
The Ryder Cup is one of the most special events I've ever been a part of, both as a spectator and as an athlete competing in it. It's quite special. It's quite unique and quite special. Nowadays, for people that don't know golf, the Ryder Cup is played every two years, and one edition is in the US, the next one, it's in Europe and so forth. We're the defending champions. So being able to win the Ryder Cup on foreign soil, I believe has become one of the more difficult feats to accomplish in golf. Last time that happened, it was in 2012 when the European team was able to win on US soil, and ever since then, it's been a pretty dominant victory by the home team.
I think each team is becoming better at optimizing their team and setting up the golf course to their advantage and using the crowd to their advantage, which here in New York shouldn't be an issue. I cannot wait to play in front of a New York crowd, because they make themselves feel present. And every time I've come, it's been so enjoyable. It's been so much fun. It'll be difficult, because I know what comes with it, but it'll be very, very enjoyable. And I think it'll be very fitting, as a European team, we can come to a sport city like New York, not quite New York, just close enough to be in New York, and claim that trophy back on US soil would be quite special. If we were able to do that, I think that would definitely rank the top three of my golfing memories, if it were to happen, and I really hope it does.
Kristen Scholer:
What are your other top golf memories?
Jon Rahm:
There's a lot of amateur ones that get in there as well. Just even small events that I won in Spain, just winning my first national championship in my home club is one of the best memories I have, what started my journey and where I could believe that I could achieve certain things in golf. But, obviously, secondly would be the two major wins that you mentioned earlier, the US Open at Torrey Pines and the Masters. The US Open was very, very special for many reasons. Torrey Pines is in San Diego, and San Diego was my favorite city before I met my wife. It was my wife's favorite city before I met her. We got engaged in San Diego. I had my first ever professional win at that golf course as well. So to get the first win. And on top of that, three Spanish players had won majors before, you mentioned Seve, José María, and Sergio. They won the Masters, all three of them won the Masters, and Seve won the Open Championship.
So to be the first Spanish player to win a major that wasn't one of those is also quite special. And then, secondly, to join these three great players to actually win the Masters and join them, and what was Seve's, I believe was 40th anniversary of his second Masters win on April 9th, which would've been his 65th birthday, I believe. My caddy was wearing... When you sign up at the Masters, you get a number, just on the order, and I was the 49th player to do it. So April 9th, he was wearing that number all week. There was so many things that made that week special, that those two are always going to be one and two in my mind, obviously. But there's a lot of amateur events that I still hold really close to my heart. My first ever college win was always going to be special. Just little things like that. But that Masters one is always going to be hard to beat. That was a very, very special week.
Kristen Scholer:
Something I'm sure your fans are excited to hear about here on the podcast. Ana, I want to turn back to the launch of OpenBank in the US, marking a major milestone for Santander and certainly will accelerate the bank's growth strategy across the country. For an athlete like Jon, success can often be measured by tournament performance, wins, as he's mentioned, and even shots under par. For you, how do you define OpenBank success here in the US?
Ana Botín:
At the end, it's about the customers. So how many customers become OpenBank users initially and then customers as we launch other products? That's a definition of success. As I say, we're basically outsourcing a lot of the value added business to third parties. We have brought that in-house. This is huge, and that's what's going to allow us to win for the customer and win for our shareholders.
As I said today in the town hall, we need to have the best tech, and for that, we need to have the best people. And that will allow us to deliver both for customers and our shareholders. So I'd say why not? Doubling the number of customers and ensuring we deliver not just the 15% we committed for next year, but 17%, 18% down the road. And, again, this is only just a comment, not a goal. I want to be very clear. That would be a huge success.
Kristen Scholer:
How do you see Santander's evolution playing out over the next five, 10, even 15 years?
Ana Botín:
I was asked that question a few minutes ago at the town hall. We have defined already back in, I think it was 2016, 2017, that we want to be a global, responsible, and open financial services platform. Delivering for both our team, our colleagues, our customers, our shareholders, and communities. That means, in today's age, being where you as a customer will be present. I.e., being present in the digital world, being present where you go to shop, where you go to buy a house, where you go to start a business. It means we need to be embedded. You are asking about Zinia. If you go shopping on Amazon or Apple and you find Santander slash Zinia and pay with me, that is where I want to be. I want to be where you as a customer are and continue to have that direct relationship with you and not through third parties.
That is really important, because we believe in the digital and the personal and the customer, not so much the product, but the customer relationship. That means I can understand you better. That means I can help you better. It means I can offer you what you need. And it means I can be profitable for my shareholders. Because you're not just going to come once a year. You're going to be coming and doing things with a bank several times, hopefully, every month, actually even every week when you actually do payments. So that is how we see the future, being where our customers are, in the digital world and in the physical world, and helping you with your holistic banking needs, which include investments, by the way. Include buying a house, starting a business, everything I just said.
Kristen Scholer:
And my guess is you'll have some new customers after they hear, of course, what both of you were able to share on this podcast.
Ana Botín:
I hope you go to openbank.us or the app store, OpenBank US, and tell me if you're able to open an account in three minutes, which I was able to, and others take four or five minutes, but it's pretty fast and pretty slick.
Kristen Scholer:
We will try it for sure. Ana, Jon, thank you so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Ana Botín:
Great to be here.
Jon Rahm:
Thank you.
Ana Botín:
Thank you.
Speaker 1:
That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen and follow us on X at ICE House podcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week Inside the Icehouse. Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
