Spanish lender Banco Santander has announced plans to make an interim distribution from 2021 earnings worth nearly €1.7bn ($2bn).
The shareholder remuneration will be made through a cash dividend of €4.85 per share, payable from 2 November 2021 and a share buyback programme of nearly €841m.
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The decision taken by the board comes after the European Central Bank (ECB) lifted restrictions on bank dividend remuneration and share buybacks till 30 September 2021.
Banco Santander executive chairman Ana Botín said: “Our business continues to perform extremely well, and we remain on track to outperform our profitability target for the year and to reach our medium-term target of a 13-15% RoTE.
“We will continue to deploy capital with discipline to high growth, high return businesses, while maintaining a fully loaded CET1 capital at the top end of our 11-12% target.”
Banco Santander also said that it will announce a further and final distribution from this year’s earnings in the first quarter of 2022.
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By GlobalDataNotably, the lender’s updated policy targets a total shareholder remuneration of approximately 40% of its underlying profit. It is divided in equal parts between cash dividends and share buybacks.
Recently, Banco Santander decided to wind down its cross-border payments app PagoFX, which is part of its fintech business PagoNxt.
The Spanish bank is shutting down PagoFX app and web service on 30 November 2021.
