Correct, their partnership has been going on for a while now however Santander plans to expand Ripple's payments network which has recently been announced. I also agree that Ripple is a project that is subject to debate (as stated in my original post). I do however believe that SEPA is outdated and i'm intrigued by Santander utilizing Ripple.
yeah, but one should bear in mind that XRP and Ripple payment network is not the same, not even close, and that XRP is not directly correlated with Ripple payment network expansion, this is something that should always be clarified, there are people who could invest based on network expansion in XRP, and there is no direct correlation