Santander hires ex-Marcus chief to lead US digital transformation
Santander has hired Swati Bhatia, Goldman Sachs’s former head of Marcus and co-CEO of GreenSky, to serve as its head of retail banking and transformation, effective immediately, the Spanish bank said Wednesday in a press release.
With the hire, Bhatia becomes the second veteran of Goldman’s consumer-banking venture to find a post-Goldman landing spot in little over a week. Stephanie Cohen, the outgoing head of Platform Solutions, the Goldman division that housed GreenSky and a portion of Marcus business, announced last week she would leave Goldman to become chief strategy officer at IT firm Cloudflare.
“Santander is a respected and innovative global banking leader, and I am excited to be joining the Retail Bank business at this pivotal moment of transformation and growth,” Bhatia said in Wednesday’s release.
Bhatia stepped down as head of Marcus in January 2023 but remained with the bank through September as an advisory director. Her departure from the Marcus role came days ahead of a wave of 3,200 job cuts Goldman announced, and less than three months after the bank launched a reorganization that de-emphasized consumer banking and re-committed to its investment-banking bread-and-butter.
Santander, too, is reorganizing. It rolled out a plan in September that includes creating a global digital consumer banking division.
“Now it’s time to accelerate towards building a digital bank with branches,” the bank’s chair, Ana Botin, wrote in an Instagram post that coincided with Santander’s February 2023 investor day.
Indeed, Santander aims to launch a fully digital consumer- and commercial-banking platform in the U.S. this summer, Reuters reported.
Bhatia’s Goldman experience may come into play there: Marcus is fully digital.
Tim Wennes, Santander’s U.S. CEO, said Wednesday the bank’s journey toward becoming a digital bank with branches “has reached an inflection point.”
“[Bhatia’s] track record of innovation in consumer banking, coupled with a strong background in risk and controls, provides her with the right combination of experiences to scale the digital platform and grow the business nationally,” said Wennes, one of two executives to whom Bhatia will report. The other is Daniel Barriuso, Santander’s global head of retail and commercial banking and group transformation.
In her role, Bhatia will lead Santander’s U.S. consumer and business banking efforts, as well as its digital transformation, with a focus on building new capabilities, simplifying existing processes and enhancing customer experiences while lowering costs, the bank said.
Santander cut about 320 of its U.S. roles in recent weeks — many centered on the bank’s retail operations.
“We are evolving our US business, investing in digital capabilities and simplified processes to adapt to changing customer needs,” the bank said in a statement this month.
While Santander has thinned its U.S. retail roles, it’s bulking up its U.S. investment-banking operations with 150 hires. That, too, marks a parallel Bhatia would have seen at Goldman.
“Santander’s globally connected technology platforms and depth of digital expertise provides a competitive advantage and positions the business for profitable growth in the U.S. market,” Bhatia said in the release Wednesday.
Bhatia joined Goldman in February 2021, just as Marcus’s chief, Omer Ismail, and deputy David Stark, were about to leave for Walmart’s nascent fintech, One.
Before joining Goldman, Bhatia worked for two years as chief payments risk officer at Stripe. She also logged eight-year stints at both PayPal and Capital One — starting at the latter as a risk analyst for upmarket cards and finishing as the point person on the bank’s “SWAT team” established to counter the looming 2007-08 recession, according to her LinkedIn profile.
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