Banco Santander, S.A. (NYSE:SAN) Q4 2023 Results Conference Call January 31, 2024 4:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Begona Morenes - Investor Relations

Ana Botin - Executive Chair

Hector Grisi - Chief Executive Officer

Jose Garcia-Cantera - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Ignacio Ulargui - BNP Paribas

Benjamin Toms - RBC

Antonio Reale - Bank of America

Carlos Cobo - Societe Generale

Sofie Peterzens - JPMorgan

Francisco Riquel - Alantra Equities

Andrea Filtri - Mediobanca

Ignacio Cerezo - UBS

Alvaro Serrano - Morgan Stanley

Marta Sanchez Romero - Citi

Begona Morenes

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Banco Santander's Conference Call to Discuss our Financial Results for the Fourth Quarter of 2023. Just as a reminder, both the results report and presentation we will be following today are available to you on our website.

I am joined here today by our Executive Chair, Ms. Ana Botin; our CEO, Mr. Hector Grisi; and our CFO, Mr. Jose Garcia-Cantera. Following their presentations, we will open the floor for any and all questions that you may have in the Q&A session.

With this, I will hand over to Ms. Botin. Ana, the floor is yours.

Ana Botin

Good morning, everybody, and thank you, Begonia. It’s great pleasure to be with you all and thank you for joining. As a reminder, we have recently announced, a last step towards one Santander. We finished the creation of the five global businesses, which we began a few years ago. I would come back to this in more detail in a moment, but I would like to note that any reference to these global businesses today relate to the new business definitions that were communicated last December.

So, the focus today will be, first, main highlights of our results and update on our strategy. Hector will then review our financial performance in greater detail and then I'll conclude with a few closing remark remarks on our guidance for '24. So, the high level messages we're presenting record results, €11.1 billion. We have delivered again on all our financial targets.

Our customer focus and scale are driving consistent, sustainable profitable growth. In '23, we added 5 million customers and our revenue increased double-digit. And we did this as we continue, and I something we've reiterated year-after-year. We are investing for the future, and we are also making excellent progress towards a more simple and more integrated model. This is the driver to the improvement in efficiency year after year, 173 basis points. And it's also the driver to increase our profitability this year to about 15% as we committed.