Santander is no stranger to partnerships in Formula One, but its transition to teaming up with the series itself represents a new strategy for the bank.
The pair launched a three-year, sustainability-focused collaboration in 2022, but the recent announcement of Santander’s deal to become the official retail banking partner of Formula One from 2025 will provide the company with even greater visibility within the series.
In Formula One circles, Santander is best known for its partnership with Ferrari, having been with the famous Italian team across two stints from 2010 to 2017 and 2022 to 2024. The brand was also associated with the McLaren team between 2007 and 2013.
Santander’s Spanish roots have often led to speculation about the company’s intentions in the sport, with many outlets predicting it would follow Spaniard Carlos Sainz to Williams Racing after it was announced in June that the financial services firm would not be continuing its Ferrari partnership. But this is a global bank with global ambitions.
By elevating itself to a fully-fledged sponsor of Formula One from 2025, Santander will now leverage its relationship with the series to target its main markets around the world, with the US, Brazil, Mexico, Spain and the UK a particular focus of the partnership.
But why did the bank decide to make this move now?
Santander are an Official Partner of @F1 for the 2025 season
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1. Brand visibility in key markets
A key benefit of the partnership is the global platform it provides Santander.
Being associated with a Formula One outfit gives a brand unique promotional opportunities, especially with the drivers, while it also enables sponsors to drive loyalty among fans of a particular team.
But Grands Prix are becoming grander in scale, particularly the destination events like the recently introduced races in Miami and Las Vegas. Indeed, since Liberty Media took over the series, Formula One has made significant efforts to improve the fan experience at its events, which hasn’t gone unnoticed by potential partners.
“One of our main goals of this new deal is to take advantage of the impact that Formula One has when it comes to a city,” Enrique Geijo, head of corporate sponsorships at Santander, tells BlackBook Motorsport.
“All our marketing teams have very high expectations of how to take advantage of Formula One in their countries. Formula One has become probably the most important event of the year for them.”
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Visibility and fan engagement opportunities in the US will also play a part in helping Santander promote its online banking service Openbank, which is launching imminently in the country.
“We want to put a lot of focus and awareness on [Openbank] next year,” Geijo explains. “You are going to see the Openbank brand at Austin and Las Vegas, so this is very important because we always say that the sponsorships help the brand awareness.”
However, Santander will only be present at two of the three US races due to the Miami Grand Prix’s existing partnership with JP Morgan Chase.
Santander has used Formula One to support its growth in new markets before. UK readers might remember a similar push the bank made back in the late 2000s ahead of its expansion into the country, when it produced a commercial with Lewis Hamilton through its partnership with McLaren.
The focus then – as it is now – was to build brand awareness after the purchase of Abbey National Building Society in 2004, Bradford and Bingley in 2008, and Alliance and Leicester in 2009. All three companies were rebranded to ‘Santander UK’ in 2010.
2. Rapid growth under Liberty Media
Sponsorship has long formed part of Santander’s wider marketing strategy, but Geijo claims that “Formula One sponsorship has undoubtedly been the flagship of the bank’s international sponsorships”. As a result, the bank is particularly well placed to benefit from the increasing popularity of the series.
Since Liberty Media’s acquisition of Formula One in 2017, the series can seemingly do no wrong. Drive to Survive has helped to attract a younger audience to the series, which has introduced plenty of other changes under its current ownership to ensure that those new fans continue to engage with the races.
“What we like with Formula One is that they have opened themselves to the audience,” Geijo states. “They have, as we do, a target that is the young audience. We feel that, with Formula One, we can be closest to them.
“If we see the series in the last six years, the path that they are following again, especially in the US, has helped us to make that decision [to partner with Formula One].”
Crucially, Santander has been involved in Formula One for many years so has seen firsthand the series’ recent evolution. Geijo specifically has been around Formula One since 2002, having previously worked at Vodafone when the company sponsored McLaren, so he is acutely aware of the major changes.
“The main change is…Formula One as a global platform of entertainment, not only motorsport – this is something we like a lot,” he continues.
“The [younger] audience is very fragmented and pay attention to several things – content creators, influencers, social media. They are building a global entertainment platform and I think this is what attracts more [attention].”
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3. Less competition for attention
Liberty Media has also had a huge impact on Formula One commercially, and the series now boasts an enviable global partnership portfolio. Much like the motorsport cliché that ‘safety cars breed safety cars’, it has been a similar case of brands attracting more brands.
It’s also been argued that the sponsorship portfolios of the teams themselves are becoming more bloated, making it difficult for brands to stand out from one another. In that sense, Geijo believes that “at the moment, Formula One has much more space and more inventory” to offer partners.
Geijo stresses that there are still numerous benefits of partnering with a team, especially the “visibility during the whole year” on the overalls and the team kit. Crucially, though, he says Formula One “gave us what we wanted” in the specific markets Santander wants to target.
There is also a pressure that comes with being associated with other sponsors while with a team, but Geijo claims the Formula One model “gives us more flexibility”.
It’s hard to ignore the potential missed opportunity of collaborating with Hamilton again once the Briton joins up with Ferrari in 2025, especially given his popularity in some of Santander’s key markets.
However, it’s clear that Santander believes it has an even bigger opportunity from its new partnership with Formula One.
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