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Thursday, October 09, 2025
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Santander’s International Payments App Wins Global Award

Santander UK have won the Payments and Wallets Award and the Silver Medal for the Most Disruptive Innovation Award at the Efma Global Distribution & Marketing Innovation Awards for financial services. Both awards recognise our pioneering use of blockchain technology to enable faster and simpler international payments. The technology is being tested by staff in a pilot, and is currently only available to Go Smart users. It was created through active collaboration across teams in Technology & Operations, Isban, Innovation, Retail and Risk.

Efma (European Financial Markets Association) is an association of over 3,000 retail financial services companies from around the world. For the awards, we beat stiff competition from 200 financial institutions who submitted over 460 innovation entries.

About the international payments app

At the moment, international transfers can take several days and customers can never be sure how much money will arrive in an overseas account. By using blockchain technology by Ripple, a Santander Innoventures supported firm, we were able to successfully deliver next-day payments and provide certainty of the transfer value.

We will then take learnings from the pilot to consider how we can improve international payment services.

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