Fortune magazine has included Santander Brazil in its 2019 list of companies that are changing the world (2019 Change the World ranking), which involves 52 companies in 18 countries. These companies have had a positive impact on the community with initiatives that form part of its strategic basis. Santander has been running its Prospera microcredit programme in Brazil since 2002. Last year, it used digital technology to drastically accelerate the approvals process, reducing it from 10 days to 10 seconds. This allowed Prospera, which provides small low-interest loans to businesspeople (a quarter of whom live below the poverty threshold), to increase the number of business owners it supports by more than 50% in 2018 and to be on the right track to increasing it another 90% this year.

Banco Santander executive chairman, Ana Botín, this morning presented the project for transforming the bank's two most iconic buildings in the capital city of Cantabria: the building on Paseo de Pereda, which is the bank headquarters, and the building on Calle Hernán Cortés, to provide the city with modern spaces for culture, technology and entrepreneurship. Gema Igual, mayor of Santander, and Miguel Ángel Revilla, president of the region, also spoke during the event, along with David Chipperfield, Antonio Cruz and Antonio Ortiz, the architects responsible for remodelling the buildings.