Manuel Silva Martínez
Partner and Head of Investments
Santander InnoVentures
A truly global company—and the largest bank in the euro zone by market cap—Banco Santander has helped shape the financial technology industry worldwide and is continuing to redefine it today. As the company innovates on a global scale, Santander InnoVentures acts as the bank’s corporate venture arm to ensure the bank can grow and continue to stay ahead of the changes in the industry. Santander InnoVentures invests in breakthrough technologies and forms strategic relationships for its portfolio companies.
In addition to capital for their portfolio of startups, Santander InnoVentures provides a unique and valuable set of connections and company-building insights to their portfolio. Further, they actively work to extend strategic and useful fintech-oriented technologies or solutions to additional geographies, whether that means bringing a US-based technology to the UK or anywhere within its purview (which includes countries in North America, LATAM and EMEA).
- To gain a comprehensive view of the global fintech private markets
- To conduct competitive analysis within and across markets
- To improve and accelerate the research process, including due diligence, valuation and return analysis
Getting a complete view of the global fintech innovation landscape
With global vision at its core, Santander InnoVentures needs to be able to look across distinct markets and make meaningful comparisons. Manuel Silva Martínez, Partner and Head of Investments, explains that it’s critical to have a comprehensive and comparative understanding of what the global market looks like. Region to region comparisons, and homogeneous data coverage, are key.
“Some data providers are very good in the US, but provide no insight into what happens elsewhere.” For his purposes, Manuel and his team needs access to markets like Brazil or Mexico, and the main innovation markets in Europe. “A list of active investors in Europe has also been crucial in our latest investments.”
As a result, PitchBook keeps the laborious work out. “Not only is PitchBook the best database overall, but the taxonomy, organization and quality of information is consistent across geographies.”
He continues, “we don’t have to take extra time to bring different companies into the same competitive framework—it’s an apples-to-apples comparison.”
Understanding the environment
Alongside global analysis comes a measure of the market and who’s playing in specific industries and similar spaces. Manuel and his team need to know what the environment really looks like. “PitchBook has helped us be precise with our competitive analysis.” He explains that for a company operating on the world scale, “having a comprehensive global view of companies and how they compete with each other is very important.”
Using that insight into market trends as well as Santander’s larger priorities, Manuel and his team utilize PitchBook to discover and map niche or specific solutions-oriented spaces. He says, “PitchBook helps us locate companies that may be in similar spaces to the ones we’re already interested in.”
To focus on the right opportunities, they filter by keyword within PitchBook, “We use keywords to look at specific types of companies. Whether that means a particular technology, data analytics capabilities, backend solutions, etc.”
This competitive analysis helps the team discover and engage with companies they deem impactful for the bank. “As a strategic investor, one of the use cases our companies are particularly interested in is our ability to take them international.”
To successfully do this, “having the ability to put a company or technology in a global context is critical.”
“When we meet a new company, we say, ‘Let me look on PitchBook to learn more about the company or the space’ so we can have a better sense of who we’re dealing with.”
– Manuel Silva Martínez
Accelerating the research process
To ensure that Santander InnoVentures is able to make more informed strategic decisions when it comes to sourcing opportunities or filtering through inbound leads, Manuel cross-checks company information using PitchBook. “In addition to direct research, we use PitchBook to identify potential opportunities that are in the sweet spot in terms of company size, market and funding window.”
In selecting a financial data provider, Manuel was particularly interested in fidelity. “I place a huge emphasis on data accuracy. By doing basic searches on our own companies [and checking against our internal knowledge and stats], we felt PitchBook had the best quality information out of the available databases.”
With PitchBook, Santander InnoVentures can more quickly and accurately get a complete view of the global markets, conduct competitive analysis and accelerate their research process on potential target companies.
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