Banco Santander's Sovereign AI Strategy: Co-Development with G42 and Mouro Capital's $400M Fund III
In mid-2026, Spanish banking giant Banco Santander has emerged as a key strategic architect in vertical financial AI, executing a dual-pronged playbook that combines a deep-tech co-development model with Abu Dhabi-based AI powerhouse G42 and a massive $400 million fintech venture capital fund via its investment arm, Mouro Capital.
The G42 Co-Development MoU: Retail AI Financial Agents and Sovereign Infrastructure
On June 3, 2026, Banco Santander and G42 officially signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) establishing a strategic co-development framework in artificial intelligence. This partnership is designed to build a banking intelligence layer and deploy agentic financial services across Santander’s global operations, particularly targeting retail customers in Europe and Latin America.
Rather than a typical software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor relationship, the collaboration is structured as a co-development partnership, pairing Santander’s banking scale, customer data, and regulatory expertise with G42's sovereign AI and high-performance computing infrastructure. Two G42 subsidiaries are leading the engineering work:
- Inception (G42's Agentic AI Company): Inception is contributing its core agentic platform, Catalyst, to serve as the foundation of the bank's sovereign AI infrastructure.
- Presight (G42's Applied AI Subsidiary): Presight is co-developing the retail-facing "AI-powered financial agent" designed to act autonomously on behalf of customers within pre-defined boundaries.
The strategy reflects a growing consensus among global financial institutions that core AI capabilities cannot be outsourced to general-purpose third-party providers. Ricardo Martín Manjón, Chief Data & AI Officer at Santander, stated:
"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.1 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."
Ashish Koshy, CEO of Inception, emphasized the unique nature of the deal:
"We are not selling AI to Santander - we are building it with them. 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."
Thomas Pramotedham, CEO of Presight, noted that the collaboration represents "one of the largest enterprise agentic AI mandates in European and Latin American banking," with the potential to democratize private banking-style advisory services for retail customers.
Mouro Capital’s $400M Fund III: Fueling the Next Wave of Vertical AI
Complementing this sovereign infra co-development is Santander's venture capital arm, Mouro Capital, which launched its $400 million Fund III in early 2026. Fund III is specifically focused on early-to-growth stage startups in vertical AI, agentic commerce, and next-generation compliance infrastructure.
By utilizing Mouro Capital to invest in the very startups that can integrate with Santander’s core banking APIs, the bank is creating an external R&D funnel that feeds directly back into its operational architecture. This dual-track strategy—co-developing core sovereign models with G42 while investing in specialized vertical AI applications via Mouro Capital—positions Santander as one of the most aggressive and structurally prepared incumbents in the global banking sector as the industry transitions to fully autonomous finance.
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An instance of A centralized banking platform, not standalone software, is the final home for vertical AI. — Santander is bypassing third-party SaaS vendors to co-develop its own core AI capabilities directly atop its sovereign banking infrastructure. ↩︎