This article is a part of Poland Unpacked. Weekly intelligence for decision-makers
Openbank, Santander’s digital banking arm, already serves two million customers across Europe and is rapidly gaining ground in the U.S. market, where it is accumulating billions of dollars in deposits. The bank now plans a rebranding and aims to offer customers a unified experience across the 26 markets in which it operates.
It has been three months since Santander Bank Polska changed ownership. Austria’s Erste Group, the bank’s new majority shareholder, is already preparing to rebrand it as Erste Bank Polska. The change is expected to take place as soon as this coming weekend (April 25–26).
This is unlikely to be the only name change for a bank operating on the Vistula River in the coming years. A second rebranding may involve Spain’s Banco Santander. Despite selling its flagship Polish bank, the Spanish group has retained a smaller unit in the country, Santander Consumer Bank, which specializes in installment and cash loans. This means that – unless the group revises its plans – the Openbank brand, already successfully established in international markets, is likely to appear in Poland sooner or later.
Openbank is Santander’s digital arm
Formally, Openbank was launched in Spain in 1995. The entity, part of the Santander Group, became the country’s first telephone bank, and in 2011 it was also the first in Spain to offer a mobile app for Android and iOS. Today, it remains Santander’s digital arm, although it now also operates a handful of flagship physical branches. It offers a broad range of services, including traditional current accounts, savings accounts, credit cards, mortgage lending, and a cryptocurrency trading platform.
In 2019, Openbank expanded into three additional markets – Germany, Portugal, and the Netherlands – operating under the EU banking passport. At the time, it already emphasized in press communications that it was Europe’s largest fully digital bank. In 2025, it took another step forward. In Germany, it formally became a branch, obtaining local IBAN account numbers. This allowed customers, for example, to have their salaries paid directly into their Openbank accounts.
At that time, the bank reported that it had attracted EUR 19 billion (approximately PLN 82 billion) in customer deposits across Europe. It now serves more than two million clients, with the largest shares located in Spain and Germany.
Geographic expansion has gone hand in hand with a widening product offering. In 2022, the bank launched Zinia, a buy-now-pay-later platform for online payments in brick-and-mortar stores. Following its success in Spain, the solution was rolled out in Germany and Austria.
The bank is also one of Europe’s leaders in introducing cryptocurrency services. In autumn 2025, it enabled clients in Germany, and later in Spain, to invest in and trade five cryptocurrencies, led by the most popular one, Bitcoin.
Over a year, Openbank has raised USD 6 billion in the U.S.
In October 2024, the bank turned to its next destination – the United States – and five months later to Mexico. In Mexico, after 13 months, Openbank already has one million customers. It is focused on a simple product offering, primarily targeting Mexicans who still do not have a bank account.
The U.S. business also holds significant potential. For years, Santander in the U.S. concentrated on the Northeast, which meant it remained absent from the ranks of the country’s 15 largest banks. Through Openbank, it aims to move from a regional to a national player. Since 2025, Patryk Nowakowski, a former board member of Santander Bank Polska, has been responsible for operations and IT at Santander’s U.S. business. He moved to Boston to support the bank’s digital transformation, including the development of its digital brand. He discussed this in detail in an extensive interview with XYZ at the time.
“For now, we only offer savings accounts. We are approaching a total of $11 billion in deposits, and our customers come from across the country,” said Patryk Nowakowski, Vice President of Santander US, 16 months after his appointment.
Openbank’s growth has been supported by a partnership announced in March 2025 with telecom provider Verizon. Through the agreement, Verizon customers gain access to savings accounts with interest rates above the market average, and can also receive a USD 180 discount on their phone bills. According to Patryk Nowakowski, further partnerships of this kind are possible.
The Bank is acquiring and plans to further expand its offering
The direction Openbank has taken is not new. A similar move was previously made by its competitor JPMorgan, which is developing its digital Chase brand in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. This year, it plans to launch it in Germany as well. The bank’s expansion was prepared by Jakub Fast, a Polish executive and former head of Chase UK. Another U.S. bank, Goldman Sachs, launched its digital retail brand Marcus in 2016, later expanding it to the United Kingdom. In 2025, it was reportedly discussing a potential debut in Ireland.
Examples can also be found in Europe. Spain’s BBVA launched its digital banking operations in Italy at the end of 2021, and four years later expanded into Germany. Romania’s Banca Transilvania, building on the local Idea Bank, created the country’s first fully digital bank, Salt Bank.
Does a focus on digital banking mean abandoning traditional mergers and acquisitions? Not necessarily. Shortly after selling its Polish business, Santander acquired a U.S. bank for USD 12.2 billion. The target was Webster Financial, headquartered in Connecticut. According to Patryk Nowakowski, regulatory approval is expected around August or September, after which Santander will likely focus more intensively on integrating the businesses. The merger is expected to generate up to USD 800 million in annual cost savings. Following the combination, Santander, with USD 327 billion in assets, will enter the top ten banking institutions in the United States.
Before that happens, customers of the group will gain access to new Openbank products. A checking account is currently in pilot phase, and work on a credit card is also nearing completion.
The Openbank brand will gradually replace Santander Consumer
This is not the end of ambitions tied to the brand. In October 2025, the Spanish group announced that it would first, in its home market and later in Germany, formally merge Openbank and Santander Consumer Finance into a single legal entity and begin operating under the name Openbank by Santander. It made clear at the time that, in the long run, this brand would be used across the entire European consumer finance business.
This means the change will eventually affect 16 European markets where Santander Consumer Bank operates. These are primarily countries in Western and Northern Europe, but also include Poland and Greece. In other words, all of these markets will undergo rebranding sooner or later. In response to our questions, Openbank’s press office added that the integration will be even broader, ultimately covering 10 non-European markets as well.
“We have chosen a direction in which Santander’s consumer finance business will operate under the Openbank brand,” Patryk Nowakowski also confirms.
It is already known that Poland will not be among the countries where the change is introduced first. The rollout will initially cover key markets such as Spain, the United States, and Mexico. The sequence of changes will depend on the size of the business, the potential of each market, and its profitability.
“At present, there are no decisions regarding changes to the name or visual identity of Santander Consumer Bank in Poland. Such processes are multi-stage and require both business analyses and the necessary regulatory approvals,” the press office of Santander Consumer Bank in Poland states.
The Goal? A single UX regardless of market
According to Ana Botín, head of the Santander Group, the bank’s retail business in each country is expected to focus on global digital platforms. The objective is to deliver consistent customer experiences and a simple, high-quality product suite.
“It is about a way of thinking about banking. We expect that within five years, Openbank – present in multiple markets – will have a unified operating model, a standardized systems architecture, and a lightweight core banking system. This will allow us to offer customers a consistent experience regardless of the market in which they use Openbank’s services. We want to do it the same way Uber does it: wherever you use it, the UX is the same,” comments Patryk Nowakowski.
He points out that Openbank’s competitive edge is intended to be a fast, intuitive application. On the one hand, it is meant to give customers access to the full product suite; on the other, it should be simple enough for most products to be just a few clicks away. In Santander’s U.S. operations, a large team is working on this, including specialists analyzing how customers use the app and how best to respond to their needs.
It is also known that the bank intends to leverage artificial intelligence. It is already testing a solution in its call center. Depending on the complexity of a customer’s issue, one of two chatbots handles the call. The bots differ in terms of operating costs.
Expert's perspective
The market has forced large banks to build digital brands
The truth, however, is blunt: most large banks are not losing to fintechs because they lack money, but because of the weight of their own organizations. Too many processes, too many layers of decision-making, too much legacy thinking. And customers do not care about that – they want things to be simple, fast, and predictable.
A digital brand can be a very good move for a large bank, but only if it is more than just a marketing wrapper. If under a new name sits the same old bank, just better designed, the market will sense it within minutes. Today, it is not the institution that claims to be digital that wins. It is the one that actually removes friction from customers’ lives.
Can such brands compete with Revolut, N26, Monzo, or Zen? Yes – but under one condition: they must operate like modern technology companies, not internal corporate projects that wait three months for everything. Fintechs are fast because they have simpler DNA. Banks are strong because they have scale, capital, regulation, and trust. If the two can be combined, a genuinely powerful model may emerge.
The Bank will rely on local licenses rather than passporting
Despite its technological ambitions, the bank will not abandon its physical branch network. The reason is simple: Santander Group serves 180 million customers, and not all of them are “digital-native” or prefer interacting with a bank solely through apps. Among them are, for example, affluent clients who prefer private banking advice in branches. As a result, rather than reducing its branch footprint, the bank will focus on maintaining locations in attractive, high-traffic areas.
The bank also does not intend to shift its European presence toward a model similar to Revolut, which for years built its expansion on a Lithuanian banking license and operated across the EU under the single European passport regime. This setup allowed it to conduct business in all 27 EU markets without obtaining separate local licenses.
“That model makes sense when a bank is being built from scratch and operates under a single license. Our situation is different. We have millions of customers and markets with highly diversified product portfolios, often with top-three or top-five positions in a given country. Changing the operating model would be very difficult and likely unwelcome from a regulatory perspective,” explains Patryk Nowakowski.
He adds that one of the key challenges will be building awareness of the new brand in the market. He acknowledges that a well-recognized brand gives customers a sense of security, which in turn encourages them to use a given institution’s services.
Santander Consumer has 1.4 million customers in Poland
Santander Consumer Bank has been operating in Poland since 1997, initially as Bank of America, and under its current name since 2006. It specializes in installment loans, cash loans, and credit cards. It does not offer traditional current accounts or mortgage lending. In October, it introduced buy-now-pay-later payments for brick-and-mortar stores, and in April it reported raising its deposit interest rate to 3.7%.
The potential arrival of Openbank in Poland could therefore present an opportunity for Santander Consumer to accelerate its development. For years, the bank remained in the shadow of Santander’s main Polish operation and ranked in the second tier of the sector in terms of balance sheet size.
The bank has a total of PLN 23 billion (approximately EUR 5.3 billion) in loans and PLN 17.9 billion (approximately EUR 4.1 billion) in deposits. At the end of 2025, it had 1.4 million customers, of whom 601,000 used its mobile app. According to Cashless.pl rankings, the bank had issued 187,000 credit cards and managed 27,000 savings accounts. It employed over 1,000 staff and operated 291 sales locations: 31 proprietary branches and 260 franchise outlets.
Expert's perspective
Competition is not between banks and fintechs, but between business models
Launching a digital bank alone does not mean an institution begins to operate like a fintech. The key difference lies in the product approach. Fintechs build solutions around specific user needs and combine multiple services into a single, coherent ecosystem, rather than simply offering a bank account and card through a modern app. At ZEN.COM, this has been the approach from the outset – combining payments, e-commerce, and additional services within one environment.
Interestingly, we are also observing the reverse trend: fintechs are increasingly adopting elements of traditional banking in order to accelerate growth and gain greater control over their product. An example is our recent investment in Ukraine, where, through the acquisition of a bank, we are building local infrastructure and developing a full-scale financial offering. This shows that the boundaries between banks and fintechs are becoming increasingly blurred.
From this perspective, competition is no longer between banks and fintechs, but between business models. Those who succeed are the ones able to build a seamless experience and respond quickly to user needs.
Key Takeaways
- New offering and role of branches: Despite its digital profile, the bank will not abandon physical branches (in Poland, nearly 300 points of sale). Santander Consumer Bank currently serves 1.4 million customers in Poland, and not all of them want or are able to rely exclusively on digital banking.
- Rebranding: Santander Bank Polska will be renamed Erste Bank Polska (April 25–26). Meanwhile, Santander Consumer Bank (SCB), which remains under Spanish ownership, will eventually be rebranded as Openbank by Santander. The process will cover 26 markets, although Poland will be included in a later phase, after the United States, Mexico, Spain, and Germany.
- Expansion and user experience: Openbank is a fully digital entity that has already accumulated €19 billion in deposits in Europe and USD 11 billion in the United States, where it partners with companies such as Verizon. The group’s goal is to create a unified operating model that delivers an identical user experience (UX) regardless of country. The benchmark is platforms such as Uber.