Abu Dhabi-based technology group G42 and Madrid-based global banking group Banco Santander have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the goal of establishing a framework for strategic cooperation in the domain of artificial intelligence (AI).
“The MoU sets out a structure for the parties to evaluate and develop joint initiatives across a number of initial workstreams, including AI-enabled advisory and savings solutions for banking customers and a banking intelligence layer spanning Santander’s global operation,” the companies said.
As per G42 and Banco Santander, the collaboration has been structured as a co-development partnership, combining Santander’s banking scale, customer relationships, and regulatory expertise with G42’s capabilities in the domains of AI, cloud computing, and digital infrastructure.
“Two G42 companies are expected to play a central role in joint development: Inception, G42’s agentic AI company, and Presight, a global leader in applied AI for intelligent systems. Their respective contributions will be defined as workstream progress and formalized in separate definitive agreements,” G42 said.
Santander Chief Data & AI Officer Ricardo Martin Manjon said, “This agreement reflects Santander’s conviction that artificial intelligence will be foundational to the future of banking, not a feature layered on top of it.” “We are approaching this as a long-term strategic partnership with one of the world’s leading AI groups. We intend to build something that is durable, compliant by design, and genuinely differentiated for our customers across all our markets.”
“G42 was built on a principle that the most consequential AI of this century cannot be outsourced—it has to be built deliberately, by institutions that own the strategic direction of the technology and choose the right partners who engineer it with them. Santander has chosen that path. The technology, the talent, and the discipline we bring to this partnership reflect a decade of delivering sovereign AI exactly where the stakes are highest—across governments, healthcare, and now banking at a global scale,” said Ali Al Amine, Chief Commercial Officer at G42 International.
“We are not selling AI to Santander—we are building it with them. Inception contributes its agentic platform, Catalyst, as the foundation; Santander contributes the domain expertise and use cases that will pressure-test it in one of the most demanding institutional environments in the world. For an agentic AI company from the UAE to enter a partnership of this kind with a global bank is, to our knowledge, without precedent,” said Ashish Koshy, CEO of Inception.
“For a generation, the experience of being known by your bank—anticipated, advised, acted for—has been the privilege of private banking customers. Together with Santander, Presight intends to build an intelligence platform designed to bring that experience within reach of every customer: an AI-powered financial agent that knows them, anticipates them, and acts for them within the boundaries they set. The collaboration could become one of the largest enterprise agentic AI mandates in European and Latin American banking, with the potential to set a benchmark globally for AI innovation in financial services,” said Thomas Pramotedham, CEO of Presight.