Santander is hiring Goldman Sachs MDs as it pays more people €1m+
Santander is paying more people over €1m and is also hiring managing directors from Goldman Sachs. Last year, regulatory filings showed that 458 people at Santander globally earned over €1m, up from 418 in 2024. Increasing pay may be one reason Santander is able to hire MDs from Goldman.
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Christian Bauer joined the Spanish bank in London last week as a managing director (MD) in its European financial sponsors M&A team. Bauer previously spent 19 years at Goldman Sachs, specialising in consumer retail M&A. Goldman made him an MD in 2021.
Bauer will have familiar faces around him at Santander. The Spanish bank’s head of European M&A, Brian O’Keefe, is a London Goldman veteran of more than 21 years. O’Keefe’s and Bauer’s careers at Goldman overlapped substantially. There’s also Govind Shanbogue, also a financial sponsors MD, who joined Santander after 13 years at Goldman back in 2023. Like Bauer, Shanbogue also did a stint in GS’ consumer retail team.
All three former Goldman bankers now at Santander coincidentally completed summer internships at either UBS or Credit Suisse. Santander also went through a phase back in 2023/2024 when it added heaps upon heaps upon heaps of bankers from Credit Suisse.
Santander’s 10% increase in people earning over €1m was driven by its highest earners. The number of people earning over €5m there went from 10 to 18 between 2024 and 2025.
The number of investment banking material risk takers (MRTs) overall also increased dramatically between 2024 and 2025, from 178 to 419. There is no indication in Santander's regulatory filings that this was the result of a definitional change, so we conclude that the bank substantially increased senior staff in its investment bank over this period.
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