The new number two of the bank will replace José Antonio Álvarez from next year
The Mexican Hector Grisi will be the new CEO of Santander. The bank announced this Friday that the current head of its subsidiary in Mexico and all the group’s businesses in North America will replace from next January 1 to Jose Antonio Alvarez, who will remain in the entity as non-executive vice president. The new number two of the bank chaired by Ana Botin has been imposed on the other great candidates: the Portuguese Antonio Simões (regional manager for Europe and CEO of the Spanish subsidiary) and the Spanish Charles King of Vincent (regional manager for South America).
The Álvarez relief process comes from afarsince the Leonese banker asked some time ago Time to leave your current position. As a preliminary step, the bank approved in February that the CEO would report directly to the board of directors and not to its president, in a measure aimed at satisfy the European Central Bank (ECB) but with limited effects in practice. With this movement, Botín now hopes to prevent the supervisor – who has to approve Grisi’s appointment – from trying to cut his executive powers, as he has done in other reorganization processes of the executive leadership of Spanish banks (the most notorious, in the BBVA).
internal candidate
The entity had activated the process to elect a new number two some time ago and has ensured that its appointments committee has evaluated, with the support of external advisors, “a large number of candidatesboth internal and external”. What is certain, in any case, is that it has primate that Álvarez’s replacement was already a senior bank executive. Other candidates that had sounded in the last months, although with less possibilities, were the Brazilian Mario Roberto Opice Leão (CEO of the subsidiary in Brazil) and the Spanish Victor Matarranz (responsible for the group’s insurance and private banking business).
Santander, thus, did not want to repeat the bad experience of the frustrated signing of the Italian Andrea Orcell. The current CEO of Italian Unicredit was announced as Álvarez’s replacement in September 2018, but a few months later Santander reported that he had given up hiring him due to his high cost and due to discrepancies with Botín. Orcel sued and a judge of first instance has sentenced the entity to compensate him with 51 million euros, a decision that the bank has appealed.
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Grisi was born in Mexico City on October 17, 1966 and is married with three children. With a degree in finance from the Universidad Iberoamericana in his hometown, he began his career in the corporate banking department (for large companies) of the Inverlat Stock Exchange between 1986 and 1991. From there he made the leap to Invermexico Financial Group, where he held various positions in the corporate and investment banking divisions. Between 1997 and 2015, she worked at the Mexican subsidiary of Credit Suisseof which he became the head before moving to Santander.
For his part, Álvarez, 62, from the small Leonese village of Quintana de Fuseros, began his career at the National Institute of Industry and from there it went to the public bank that would give rise to Argentine. After its merger with the BBV, he worked for three years in the resulting entity (BBVA) and from there he made the leap to Santander in 2002, and two years later he was named CFO. In 2014, shortly after the arrival of Ana Botín to the presidency after the unexpected death of her father, he was appointed CEO to replace Javier Marín, who had not been in office for two years but was Emilio Botín’s confidant. , with whose legacy the new executive wanted to cut.