Ana Botín was born in Santander, Spain, in 1960 and trained at Bryn Mawr and Harvard. She joined the family bank in 1988 after years at JPMorgan, ran Santander UK with notable success and was named executive chair in 2014 after the death of her father, Emilio Botín.
Under her leadership Santander has consolidated its position as one of the largest retail and commercial banks in the eurozone and in Latin America, with leading franchises in Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom, and has accelerated the rollout of a unified digital platform that reduces marginal cost of cross-border customer acquisition.
She is also a prominent voice in European industrial policy and in the integration of European capital markets, and she chairs initiatives focused on women's economic empowerment across the bank's geographies.