The new minimum standards means that all of Santander’s businesses around the world will offer at least 14 weeks paid leave for mothers and four weeks for the secondary parent. 

Santander has also launched a recommendation to its core markets to adopt best practices in the employment of professionals with disabilities in line with its commitment with diversity.   

Madrid, March 6, 2020 – PRESS RELEASE
Santander has implemented a global minimum standard for parental leave across all of its markets, with mothers offered at least 14 weeks of paid leave and secondary parents offered at least 4 weeks. 

The bank has implemented these standards to help it achieve its goal of increasing the number of women in senior roles to 30% by 2025, compared to 23% at the end of 2019. Santander is committed to maintaining fair pay practices, and has a target to eliminate our calculated equal pay gap by 2025 (already 2%), with actions in place to reduce this each year, as well as being among the top 10 companies to work for in the majority of its markets by 2021.  

The change will lead to an increase in maternity leave for Santander employees in three markets (Argentina, Mexico and the US) in which we operate and in six geographies (Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Portugal, Poland and Uruguay) in the case of secondary parent leave. In markets which have regulations that are more beneficial than the common group standard, these will apply. 

Ana Botín, Group executive chairman, said: “To build a more responsible bank, we want to do more to ensure every member of the Santander team is treated in a way that is Simple, Personal and Fair. That’s why we are now implementing, right across the Group, minimum standards for maternity and paternity policies which will benefit thousands of our employees. Getting the balance between family life and work can be tough, and we want to help our employees get that balance right. This shows our commitment to supporting them, and to fostering diversity and equality. There’s still more to do, but this is an important step in the right direction.”

This new minimum standards will be implemented globally over a 3 year period depending on the markets. In the case of secondary parental leave, it can be taken in a single period or divided into periods of 15 days each until the child is one year old.

Santander has taken an additional step forward in its commitment to diversity by recommending  that countries with legal requirements to employ disabled people meet or exceed the regulatory demands by only effectively hiring employees with disabilities rather than complying with the obligation to do so through financial contributions. In the case of markets where there is no legal quota, the Group recommends to reach or increase by one percentage point the number of employees with disabilities. All Group geographies are also encouraged to implement local programs to support employees with close relatives with disabilities.

Banco Santander (SAN SM, STD US, BNC LN) is a leading retail and commercial bank, founded in 1857 and headquartered in Spain. It has a meaningful presence in 10 core markets in Europe and the Americas, and is one of the largest banks in the world by market capitalization. Its purpose is to help people and businesses prosper in a simple, personal and fair way. Santander is building a more responsible bank and has made a number of commitments to support this objective, including raising over €120 billion in green financing between 2019 and 2025, as well as financially empowering more than 10 million people over the same period. At the end of 2019, Banco Santander had EUR 1.05 trillion in total funds, 145 million customers, of which 21.6 million are loyal and 37 million are digital (52% of active customers), 12,000 branches and 200,000 employees. Banco Santander made underlying profit of EUR 8,252 million in 2019, an increase of 2% compared to the previous year.