Banco Santander and G42 sign Memorandum of Understanding to explore strategic cooperation in Artificial Intelligence
Framework covers banking intelligence, agentic financial services and large-scale AI infrastructure.
G42 companies Inception and Presight are expected to contribute to joint development;
Madrid, Abu Dhabi 3rd June 2026.
G42, the Abu Dhabi-based technology group and Banco Santander, S.A. (“Santander”), the Madrid-based global banking group, have signed a memorandum of understanding establishing a framework for strategic cooperation in artificial intelligence.
The MOU sets out a structure for the parties to evaluate and develop joint initiatives across a number of initial workstreams, including AI-enabled advisory and savings solutions for banking customers and a banking intelligence layer spanning Santander’s global operation.
The collaboration is structured as a co-development partnership, combining Santander’s banking scale, customer relationships and regulatory expertise with G42’s artificial intelligence, cloud and infrastructure capabilities. Two G42 companies are expected to play a central role in joint development: Inception, G42’s agentic AI company, and Presight, a global leader in applied AI for intelligent systems. Their respective contributions will be defined as workstream progress and formalized in separate definitive agreements.
Santander Chief Data & AI Officer, Ricardo Martín Manjón, said: ‘’This agreement reflects Santander’s conviction that artificial intelligence will be foundational to the future of banking, not a feature layered on top of it. We are approaching this as a long-term strategic partnership with one of the world’s leading AI groups, we intend to build something that is durable, compliant by design, and genuinely differentiated for our customers across all our markets.”
“G42 was built on a principle that the most consequential AI of this century cannot be outsourced – it has to be built deliberately, by institutions that own the strategic direction of the technology and choose the right partners who engineer it with them”, said Ali Al Amine, Chief Commercial Officer at G42 International. “Santander has chosen that path. The technology, the talent and the discipline we bring to this partnership reflect a decade of delivering sovereign AI exactly where the stakes are highest - across governments, healthcare and now banking at global scale”
“We are not selling AI to Santander - we are building it with them,” said Ashish Koshy, CEO of Inception. “Inception contributes its agentic platform, Catalyst, as the foundation; Santander contributes the domain expertise and use cases that will pressure-test it in one of the most demanding institutional environments in the world. For an agentic AI company from the UAE to enter a partnership of this kind with a global bank is, to our knowledge, without precedent.”
"For a generation, the experience of being known by your bank - anticipated, advised, acted for - has been the privilege of private banking customers," said Thomas Pramotedham, CEO of Presight. "Together with Santander, Presight intends to build an intelligence platform designed to bring that experience within reach of every customer: an AI-powered financial agent that knows them, anticipates them and acts for them within the boundaries they set. The collaboration could become one of the largest enterprise agentic AI mandates in European and Latin American banking, with the potential to set a benchmark globally for AI innovation in financial services."
The parties intend to progress each workstream through dedicated governance, with any definitive initiative being subject to commercially binding arrangements being documented through that process and to full compliance with applicable governance, legal and regulatory obligations, including any applicable transparency and data protection requirements.