Report: Santander and Amazon Negotiating Consumer Finance Partnership in EU

Banco Santander and Amazon are reportedly close to reaching a deal in which the bank would provide financing options for Amazon shoppers across the Europe Union (EU).

The negotiations between the companies are at an advanced stage, Bloomberg reported Friday (June 21), citing unnamed sources.

Reached by PYMNTS, both Amazon and Santander declined to comment on the report.

If a deal is reached, the consumer finance partnership will be launched in Germany and then expanded to other European countries, according to the report.

Santander has said in the past that it aims to grow its digital consumer finance business by signing deals with global tech companies, the report said.

Partnerships like these allow consumers to access loans to finance their purchase at checkout, and they enable retailers to sell products that customers may not be able to afford otherwise, per the report.

This report comes about a week after Santander said that its digital consumer finance platform Zinia became the provider of consumer finance services for Apple in Germany, both in physical stores and at apple.de.

With this agreement, Zinia will offer Apple customers the option to defer payments by splitting the total amount into installments or by deferring the payment 30 days after shipment or in-store pickup, Santander said in a June 10 press release.

The sign-up takes seconds, and the experience is “agile, intuitive and secure,” the bank said in the release.

“Since 2022, Zinia has been present in Germany offering a range of financing solutions (buy now, pay later and installments, among others),” Santander said in the release. “In the coming months [it] will continue its expansion in Germany and different European countries.”

PYMNTS Intelligence has found that embedded finance benefits both consumers and companies by creating more avenues for consumers to interact with their favorite brands.

Eighty-eight percent of companies offering embedded finance said that this offering increased consumer engagement, according to “How Nonfinancial Brands Can Benefit From Offering Embedded Financial Services,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and Galileo collaboration.

The report also found that 32% of consumers reported spending more with a non-financial brand as a result of receiving a financial product from that brand.