The roots of Spanish banking internationalisation: BBVA and Santander

Since the 1990s, BBVA and Banco Santander have undergone a huge transformation; they have gone from being two of the largest Spanish banks to two of the world’s biggest. Although the internationalisation process intensified from the 1990s on, some of the banks that were merged to form BBVA and Banco Santander had a previous history of internationalisation. This paper addresses two main issues. Firstly, we explore why Spanish banks internationalise and why Latin America has been the main region of expansion for these two banks. Secondly, we examine how Spanish banks internationalise and how BBVA and Santander adopted different internationalisation strategies. To that end, the paper examines the roots of international expansion and explains the main changes occurring in the 1990s that encouraged the internationalisation process of both banks.