The bank awarded over 260,000 euros in prize money up to June and now has over 200 companies dotted across the globe in its exclusive Santander X 100 community.

Madrid, 5 September 2024.
From the 3,800 entries to the Santander X Awards that cover nine of the bank’s core markets to the almost 1,000 submissions to Santander X Global Challenge | Education, Employability, Entrepreneurship, some 6,000 entrepreneurs, startups, scaleups and SMEs took part in the bank's initiatives, challenges and contests in the first half of this year.  

In 2023 alone, Santander helped 7,036 entrepreneurs and startups through training, support and resources to finance their initiatives.

Santander X is a global platform aimed at entrepreneurial initiatives and companies at each stage of their business’s life cycle, offering training, advice, benefits, discounts and access to events that help them grow and transform their ideas. It also hands out awards and cash prizes, as well as the chance to join the exclusive Santander X 100 community.

In the first six months of the year, hundreds of young people and multidisciplinary teams put forward innovative solutions to overcome the issues and meet the needs of society, industry and economic sectors in such areas as digital transformation, health, education, employability and efficiency.

The winning entrepreneurs and companies took home a share of over 260,000 euros in the first half of the year, not mention other benefits the bank offers them.

Scaleups Bcas (Spain), Key2enable (Brazil) and  MyPocketSkill (UK); startups Pack2Earth (Spain), Lambda Agri (UK) and Snowball (UK); and entrepreneurial initiatives FiberSight (Portugal), Woke AgTech (Argentina) and Smart Recycle (Uruguay), were just some of the successful entries.

World's best bank for SMEs, Euromoney

In 2023, Banco Santander helped 7,036 entrepreneurs and companies grow their ideas and businesses through training, advice, mentoring and awards. Magazine Euromoney recently named us the “Best bank for SMEs” in Spain, Chile and Poland on the back of our efforts in supporting startups, and we were also named the world's “Best bank for SMEs” for the third time in six years.

Santander and its support for education, employability and entrepreneurship

Banco Santander is firmly committed to progress and inclusive sustainable growth. It has been a pioneering stalwart of education, employability and entrepreneurship for 27 years, standing out among the world's financial institutions. Santander has deployed more than €2.3 billion and delivered over 1.5 billion aid to individuals and businesses through agreements with nearly 1,200 universities and organizations. We also featured in Fortune magazine’s 2023 “Change the World” list as one of the biggest contributors to making the world a better place (www.santander.com/universidades).