Explore the details of the Santander X Global Challenge

Telefónica, through Telefónica Open Gateway, and together with Banco Santander and Oxentia Foundation, launch in October 2024 a global challenge to revolutionise user experiences in the digital landscape. It was a competition for startups and scaleups from 11 countries to develop projects or solutions that improve customer experiences.  With this, they could learn in more detail and leverage the capabilities of the network to optimise their digital services in security, authentication and user experience improvement, driving innovation across all sectors. 
  
It aimed to boost the growth of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, identifying innovative solutions to improve the customer experience, with photos in three areas: personalisation, with experiences tailored to the reality of the consumer; omni-channeling that guarantees a differential experience by unifying communication channels, and human connection, combining the physical and digital relationship with the customer.  
  
The winning companies received various rewards, including a cash prize of 120,000 euros in total, access to the Santander X 100 global community —the exclusive global community with the most outstanding Santander X companies— and visibility through the network of contacts of the organising companies.  
 
We announced the winners at Mobile World Congress 2025, but you can read more about what happened in the contest on the official Santander X website. You will learn how they are committed to shaping the future of technology through a new era of user experiences.

As we told you, Santander X Global Challenge: New era of Customer Experience sought to reach the most cutting-edge solutions to meet the needs of customers, making available our capabilities as a Telco and all the potential of 5G. Thus, we opened the doors to companies that wanted to make a leap in the following areas of improvement:

• Personalisation of experiences, to tailor services to the individual circumstances of each consumer. Examples include: support with AI-based virtual assistants, product recommendations using hyper-personalisation techniques, gamification-based loyalty programmes..
• Ensuring omnichannelity, with solutions that ensure a differentiated and unified experience across different communication channels. This field included proposals such as platforms that integrate the different communication supports and enable agile management of content or services that use Generative Artificial Intelligence to obtain better results.
• Human Connection, interspersing physical and digital interaction to ensure customer centric operation. Some cases were physical robots to interact with the buyer, emotional biometrics to measure facial expressions and get customer feedback or neurotechnology to understand consumer preferences. 

The awards ceremony was announced at Mobile World Congress 2025, where the finalists travelled to present their proposals to a specialised jury and unveil the final result of this global challenge. Want to discover the best solutions? Here are the winners of the challenge:

• Arcube (startup), helping travel providers generate loyalty revenue by analysing historical and current passenger data to personalise rewards and increase retention.
• EV8 Switch (startup), accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles by analysing vehicle usage and delivering personalised recommendations based on cost, range and charging availability.
• Lumen (startup), offering highly personalised customer care and technical support, with Generative Artificial Intelligence, enabling fast and seamless business integration.
• FROGED (scaleup), centralising and personalising interactions with users across multiple channels, turning customer service into a revenue stream.
• WIVI Vision (scaleup), providing AI-powered 3D gaming solutions to diagnose and treat vision problems in children.
• 3D Digital Venue (scaleup), enhancing ticketing and venue management with innovative 3D visualisation technology, optimising event operations and fan interaction. 

The winning projects received a cash prize of 120,000 euros, access to Santander X 100 and Santander's open innovation team to explore opportunities for collaboration and promotion through the bank's official channels. In addition, they were able to establish contact with Wayra's network of investment professionals and get to know their offices. Congratulations to all of them! 

More than 1,000 companies took part in the challenge and competed to pioneer the next generation of digital experiences. Want to keep up to date with more news like this? Subscribe to our monthly newsletter and don't miss out on the progress we make on the project.