Aiaz Kazi is the Chief Platform Officer of Santander. Kazi's role supports the bank’s transformation to become an open platform for financial services, reporting directly to Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Lindsey Argalas.

In this newly created role, Kazi will be responsible for helping the bank evolve the way it delivers products and services to its customers. Santander’s open and collaborative technology strategy is a crucial part of its digital transformation to better meet needs of its 144 million customers.

Kazi will lead the open platform for financial services working with Santander’s global technology division and teams across the bank’s 10 core markets in Europe and the Americas. Santander is already transforming its front-office, so that all product and services are available in digital channels, and its back-office: re-engineering, digitizing and automatizing all processes. Given the bank’s scale and extensive customer and partner base, the bank views evolving into an open global platform as the natural next step.

Kazi was previously head of Platform Ecosystem for Google Cloud, following a long stint at SAP, where he launched, shaped and helped grow SAP HANA to become one of the most successful enterprise platforms. He brings a wealth of experience to the bank in developing cloud platforms, growing developer and partner ecosystems, and driving platform adoption, to the benefit of both customers and technology partners.

Aiaz is based in San Francisco with a global remit. He has an MBA from the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Bombay, India. Kazi is the latest in a string of senior hires from Amazon, Google, Facebook, PayPal and Intuit, complementing bank-experienced entrepreneurial talent from Santander’s local markets.