Latin America’s best bank for ESG 2026: Santander
Santander finished 2025 with a broad sustainable finance regional footprint and the results to match. It enabled BRL38.6 billion ($7 billion) of sustainable business in Brazil, mobilised MXN51 billion ($2.9 billion) in Mexico and cleared its Chilean target ahead of schedule, reaching $1.76 billion of cumulative sustainable financing against a $1.5 billion goal set for 2021 to 2025.
Along the way it structured the first green bond aligned with Mexico’s sustainable taxonomy, closed the first green deposits in Latin America, coordinated the first international green bond from an Argentine company and guaranteed the first New Climate Fund reforestation deal in Brazil. It did so while holding 41% of Brazil’s decarbonisation credit market and reaching 62,730 people through Mexico’s Tuiio inclusion platform.
What ties this together is a single operating standard rather than a set of local initiatives. Transactions are subject to internal classification and governance controls in markets such as Mexico and Chile, which the bank maps to the EU taxonomy; Mexico and Uruguay both completed double materiality assessments aligned with European standards, and Uruguay was among the first financial institutions in the country to do so. In Mexico, ESG metrics feed into short-term compensation and into long-term schemes for senior executives.
Firsts, and a stress test
In Brazil, Santander guaranteed a BRL100 million reforestation transaction for the carbon-removal firm Mombak, restoring degraded land in Pará, of which BRL80 million came from the New Climate Fund and BRL20 million from a BNDES line.
In Mexico, the capital Mexico City’s green bond ran to MXN3 billion, with Santander as sole sustainability structuring agent and bookrunner; the bank also led the development of the city’s sustainable financing framework, which Fitch rated Excellent. The same team extended a $100 million green loan to Grupo Lomas, financing the first hotel in the Yucatán peninsula to secure green funding, and closed four green deposits worth MXN500 million.
The regional award rests on consistency: Santander also takes the awards for ESG in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay
Argentina was the stress test. The domestic labelled bond market shrank to roughly $65 million across seven issues, from $282 million a year earlier. Santander book ran about $35 million of that and coordinated Genneia’s $400 million green bond, but the more telling response was keeping green lending moving through channels that did not depend on capital markets: ARS79.5 billion ($53.6 million) of green retail production through interest-free instalment campaigns and ARS24.7 billion of agricultural green loans through the NERA platform, with AI-based farmland analysis used to verify that the practices being financed were actually adopted.
Social outcomes are also measured rather than asserted. Brazil’s Prospera microfinance arm produced BRL5.2 billion of credit in 2025 and serves 1.2 million customers, with more than 10,000 people reached by its in-person financial education programme. Mexico’s Tuiio platform has granted 223,924 microcredits since 2023, 86% of them to women. Santander Chile financially empowered 4.11 million people during the year, passing a four million target set for 2019 to 2025. Argentina became the first bank in the country to block gambling transactions for customers aged 13 to 17, a product decision backed by its own national research and an IPSOS study across 10 countries.
External validation is strong, too. Chile secured an MSCI AA rating for the first time, scored 85 in S&P’s Corporate Sustainability Assessment and is the only Chilean bank in the DJSI emerging markets index. In Uruguay, the central bank awarded Santander one of the highest governance ratings in its supervisory history. The regional award rests on that consistency: Santander also takes the awards for ESG in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.
