• The program offers 45 Santander Scholarships for women executives with 15 to 25 years of professional experience.
• The deadline for applying for one of these scholarships is 29 April 2019 at www.becas-santander.com

Madrid, 8 March 2019 - Today initiates the registration period to apply for one of the 45 scholarships of the Santander W50 program promoted by Banco Santander. Its goal is providing high-performance training to female executives from around the world with great leadership skills, to hold positions in senior management and boards of directors in companies.

Although the presence of women in these positions is gradually gaining ground, to this day we are still far from targets such as the one recommended by the CNMV's Good Governance Code to reach 30% of women on the boards of directors of listed companies by 2020.

For this reason, Banco Santander is promoting programs to empower and support the role of women in the business world, such as Santander W50.

Ana Botín, executive chairman of Banco Santander, declared that she was "very happy to launch today the call for Santander W50 Scholarships, so that leading professional women from our geographies can be trained at UCLA to reach positions on boards of directors and promote this through diversity, sustainable and inclusive growth".

The program was born in 2011 and since then more than 300 women from around the world have been able to participate in the initiative. It consists in three months of training divided into three modules, the first of online preparation, the second of classroom training at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and the third of follow-up in working groups.

Participants receive training in subjects essential to the leaders of the future: strategic leadership, organizational intelligence, corporate governance, business strategy, negotiation, as well as mentoring and networking.

Experience at UCLA forms the core of the total training, with intensive work, evaluations, and in-depth analysis to reinforce all the knowledge acquired. Both the terms and conditions of the call for applications and the grant application can be consulted and processed through www.becas-santander.com

Banco Santander is firmly committed to higher education through Santander Universities, a unique international initiative that distinguishes it from other financial institutions. Santander is the private company that invests the most in support of Education in the world (Varkey/UNESCO-Fortune 500 Report) with more than 1,200 collaboration agreements with universities and institutions in 21 countries.  Since 2002, the entity has allocated more than 1,700 million euros to academic initiatives and in 2018 alone it granted more than 73,000 scholarships and aid with the aim of contributing, through its support for education, to the progress of individuals, companies and society.