Santander weighs 3,000 AI-era early retirements in Spain

TL;DR:

• Santander has begun union talks over offering voluntary early retirement to up to 3,000 staff in Spain, according to Expansión.
• The bank says no targets are set, but unions are negotiating a framework running to 2028.
• It expects AI initiatives to deliver more than €1bn in cost savings and revenue by 2028.

Europe’s banks are starting to put numbers on what AI means for headcount. Santander has opened negotiations with unions over a voluntary early-retirement scheme that could cover as many as 3,000 employees in Spain, Spanish newspaper Expansión reported — a potential 10% to 15% of its roughly 20,000 staff in its home market.

Efficiency targets meet workforce reality

Santander was careful to frame the talks as open-ended, saying discussions with unions are ongoing and no specific targets have been set. The largest banking union, Comisiones Obreras, confirmed negotiations running until July for voluntary retirements extending to 2028, while stressing this is not a mandatory restructuring. The scheme on the table offers 74% of gross annual pay for staff aged 55 to 57, rising to 76% for those 58 and over. Context matters here: around 800 staff left under a similar scheme in 2025 and about 400 so far this year, so the latest move would mark a step up rather than a reversal.

The backdrop is explicit. In February, Santander said AI initiatives would bring more than €1bn in cost savings and revenue by 2028, and the bank has already trimmed about 14,000 roles globally over two years. That places it within a broader pattern of banks reshaping around the technology — from Oracle shedding 21,000 jobs to Deutsche Bank crediting AI with cutting project timelines. Not every move is a cut: Lloyds is hiring 300 tech experts to drive its own AI push.

Looking forward

For UK financial-services workers, Santander’s approach is an early template for how large European lenders may manage AI-driven efficiency — through attrition and voluntary exits rather than blunt redundancies. The harder question, still unanswered, is whether the roles being retired are genuinely automated away or simply not being backfilled, and how banks reskill the staff who remain.