Spain’s Santander hired 4,500 IT staff globally in 2023, the bank has said.

The company revealed that its recruitment drive had seen its IT workforce increase to 27,500 globally as it continues its digital transformation.

The broad range of hires covers areas including cloud, cybersecurity, data, DevSecOps, artificial intelligence, software development, enterprise architecture and product management.

The recruitment drive was part of the bank’s Be Tech! with Santander programme, which has lead to 27,500 STEM professionals joining Santander’s 10 core markets in Europe and the Americas.

This programme, which has been launched in several countries where the bank operates, such as Spain, Brazil, Mexico, the United Kingdom or the United States, has 400 vacancies for technology roles.

A major part of Santander’s digital transformation is Gravity, Santander’s in-house digital cloud-native core banking platform and a software that enables the migration of the core banking system from mainframe to the cloud. Some 95 per cent of the bank’s infrastructure has already moved to the Gravity platform.

Santander said that it hopes to have moved the majority of its core banking around the world to Gravity by the end of 2024. It has already migrated all of its business clients in the UK, consumer clients in Chile, and the Corporate & Investment Banking (Santander CIB) business without any service interruption, and said the transition is progressing well in Brazil.

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