(GLOBE NEWSWIRE via COMTEX) --Santiago, December 21, 2018

Santander is pleased to announce the opening of our 40th Work Café in Chile with the opening of a Work Café in Puerto Varas. This fulfills the Bank's target of opening a total 40  branches in this innovative style by the end of 2018.  The Work Café branches are a creation of the Santander Chile team, first launching at the end of 2016.

WorkCafé branches are a space for clients and non-clients to come into the Bank to work, have a coffee, and hold a meeting or request banking advice from an account executive if they choose. These branches are highly technological with no back- office or human tellers. Today at a traditional branch the ratio between sales and administrative personnel is 1 to 1. At Work Cafés this relationship is 3:1 leading to more productive branches.  The Work Cafés are visually attractive and have become a meeting point for businessmen, entrepreneurs and students, since anyone can enter and wifi is offered free. Clients can make presentations to their clients or suppliers or stop in to hear one of our economists give a talk. We host a radio talk show in one of the Work Cafés where they touch topics on entrepreneurship, innovation, economy and initiatives that give back to the community.

The concept of the Work Café is being exported to other countries of the Santander Group with pilot branches already open in Spain, Argentina and Brazil.

About Banco Santander               

Banco Santander Chile is the largest Bank in the Chilean market in terms of assets, loans and equity. As of September 30, 2018, we had total assets of Ch$38,026 billion (U.S.$57.9 billion), outstanding loans net of allowances for loan losses of Ch$29,168 billion (U.S.$44.4 billion), total deposits of Ch$20,762 billion (U.S.$ 31.6 billion) and equity of Ch$3,129 billion (U.S.$4.8 billion). Our BIS ratio up to September 2018 was 13.0%, with a core capital ratio of 10.2%. Our long-term credit risk rating are A1 by Moody's, A Fitch and A Standard & Poor's.

This announcement is distributed by West Corporation on behalf of West Corporation clients.

The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.

Source: Banco Santander-Chile via Globenewswire