Santander said Tuesday that it has expanded its partnership with Nvidia after developing banking-specific AI models.

The bank said its Santander AI Lab has developed new capabilities to evaluate AI models and AI agents for banking applications, which can help identify the most suitable model for specific tasks while improving efficiency. The tools have significantly reduced inference costs while also improving customer service performance in experimental deployments, it added.

According to Santander, the initiative has enabled it to move away from large general-purpose AI models towards smaller, specialised models designed for banking workloads. In selected experimental use cases, serving costs fell from around €5 per interaction to approximately €0.03 while maintaining performance.

The bank also said an experimental customer service deployment improved conversation quality while reducing costs by more than 50 per cent through the use of a more efficient AI model.

As part of the programme, Santander has developed Model Arena, a platform that evaluates open-weight AI models against banking-specific tasks to determine which is best suited for different workloads. The bank is also using Nvidia NeMo Customizer to create specialised models and Nvidia Kumo foundation models for structured data applications.

Santander said the AI Lab is also using Nvidia Dynamo-Triton to industrialise AI inference within the bank's technology architecture while developing tools to design, simulate, evaluate and supervise AI agents. The initiative includes performance engineering and adversarial testing of conversational AI before technologies are deployed more widely across the organisation.

The bank said the latest phase of the collaboration focuses on creating governed AI agents and specialised models that offer greater control, lower operating costs and improved safety for banking applications.

Santander and Nvidia have now agreed a three-year collaboration framework covering foundation models, AI agents, fraud and anti-money laundering capabilities, real-time decision-making and digital twin technologies for banking.

Iñaki Bernal, chief artificial intelligence officer at Santander, said: “Nvidia is a key player in the infrastructure, software and research that is powering the latest advances in artificial intelligence. Combined with Santander's scale across businesses, customers and geographies, we believe we are uniquely positioned to succeed in transforming those advances into practical banking capabilities.”

---