Combining the Wisdom of Age and the Spirit of Youth: My Never Stand Still Conversation with Banco Santander Executive Chairman Ana Botín

For this episode of Never Stand Still, I had the great pleasure of speaking to my friend Ana Botín, executive chairman of Banco Santander and a true role model for responsible leadership. To give you a brief overview of some of her accolades as a testament to her contributions to the financial services industry, Forbes named her one of its Top 10 Most Powerful Women, she was honored with the FIRST Award for Responsible Capitalism, and was named an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

As the fourth generation in her family to serve as executive chairman of Banco Santander, Ana is admirably transparent about her privilege and her sense of responsibility to use that privilege to contribute to society. From working in partnership with the government to help efficiently distribute resources during the COVID-19 pandemic, to helping people and businesses do well using Santander’s services every day, Ana embodies what means to be values-driven leader who gives back.

Ana and I always look to each other for counsel and wisdom, and I am so glad to share some of hers with each of you here. Here’s some of what I took away from our conversation.

It’s good business to do good.

I always enjoy hearing how someone’s upbringing has informed their approach to business and leadership. As was my experience, Ana was raised with a sense of responsibility to do good and had strong examples in her mother and other family members who’ve done so before her. In Ana’s case, she also lived and worked all over the world, where she had to make new friends, learn new cultures, and appreciate diversity from a young age. She did not know it at the time, but those were the early days of understanding how essential diversity, inclusion, and social responsibility are to a successful business.

Ana says it very plainly: “It’s good for business to do good.” And doing good has helped Santander stay open for more than 160 years. She went on to say, “Being responsible is not just a nice thing. It's not just good for society. It's actually very good for your shareholders over time.” I could not agree more. At PayPal, we aim to do right by all our stakeholders and believe it ultimately drives value for our shareholders. Taking care of our employees—our most important stakeholder—like we did when we launched the Employee Financial Wellness initiative last year, has meant our employees can take better care of customers going through an extraordinary time of change and uncertainty due to the pandemic.

Public-private partnerships are increasingly important in today’s world.

Ana has advocated for an inclusive and equitable response to the economic crisis in Europe caused by COVID-19, and public-private partnership has been essential to accomplish that. From Ana’s perspective, business “has to be part of the solution,” which is why Santander has been actively partnering with governments around the world to ensure people and businesses have the liquidity they need so desperately during this time. Just in recent months, Santander has worked with ministries in Spain to help scale its distribution of unemployment benefits and to source personal protective equipment and respirators needed to adequately respond to the pandemic.

It is so critical for the private and public sectors to work together and combine strengths—not just to get through this pandemic, but to advance and improve our societies and deliver solutions at scale. We were so pleased to be able to actively partner with the U.S. government to distribute Paycheck Protection Program loans and stimulus checks to our customers earlier this year. We also look forward to continuing our partnerships with governments as they continue thinking about the role of digital payments in our economies of the future.

Always come back to your culture and values.

Given Santander has nearly 200,000 employees all over the world, and the bank has acquired several other companies in recent years, it is easy to lose a common sense of culture and values that bind everyone together. In Santander’s case, they know their values: to do business in a way that is “simple, personal and fair.” And, their culture—“combining the wisdom of age and the spirit of youth”—sets them apart. This mantra inspires them to innovate, solve challenges, and serve customers every day, while adhering to the strict regulations that come with being in the financial services industry.

We have innovation baked right into our values at PayPal and, like Santander, our values help unify our global workforce of 20,000 employees. Particularly when we’re all working remotely, it can be challenging to bring together a global workforce of so many different people and perspectives. But, when we do it in service of a common mission and values, employees bring their best thinking to work and we unlock new ideas and opportunities in the process.

Check out the video below to hear to our full conversation, including about how Ana got back up after being told she had to leave her family’s bank and what that taught her about the challenges facing small businesses. Let me know what resonated with you most in the comments below.