Banco Santander SA (SAN) Q1 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2022

April 26, 2022 4:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this conference call to discuss our financial results for the first quarter of 2022. Just as a reminder, both the results report and the presentation we will be following today are available to you on our website. I'm joined here today by our CEO, Mr. José Antonio Alvarez; and our CFO, Mr. José García Cantera. Following their presentations, we will open the floor for any and all questions you may have in the Q&A session.

With this, I will hand over to Mr. Alvarez, José Antonio, the floor is yours.

Jose Antonio Alvarez

Thank you, Begonya. Good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning. I'm going to start with the with the first quarter results, starting with the activity levels of the group in the quarter where we continue to have a good customer activity, customer meeting activity. We keep growing the customer base, 2 million more customers in the quarter, 7 million more since March 2021. This reflect our growing business and increased customer satisfaction. As you know, this is one of our goals, and we rank in the top 3 in NPS in markets now. While the transactionality and the digital adoption keeps growing at a good pace, 49, almost 50 million digital customers, 5 million more than in March 2021, and transactions in digital channels are growing at 50%, not the digital option is a good pace.

As a result of this, our volumes in the balance sheet being launched and deposits kept grown, both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year, and we translate this into customer revenue growth that you're going to see in our P&L.

So going to the performance, results and profitability. The Q1 attributable profit was €2.5 billion, 18% versus first Q '21 in underlying profit and 58% year-on-year when we compare it with the attributable profit. Remember that last year, we bring around €500 million restructuring costs that we don't have this year. On the cost side, and this is particularly important in this unexpected high inflationary environment, we will do the cost to remain well below inflation and allow us to improve our efficiency ratio in line with our guidance of getting 45%. We improved our profitability ratios quarter-on-quarter, year-on-year. Our return on tangible equity went to 14.2% and EPS growing at 22% compared with the Q1 '21.