Intellect Global Transaction Banking (iGTB), the transaction banking specialist from Intellect Design Arena Limited, ranked #1 in the world for Transaction Banking by IBS Intelligence, is honoured to have played a part in this remarkable transformation, recognised by Aité-Novarica, the leading independent financial services insights and advisory firm. Their Payments Case Study report “Implementing a Market Leading Global Payments Platform,” by highly respected analyst Erika Baumann, Research Director, Commercial Banking and Payments Practice, and published today, shows how Santander, one of the largest banks in Europe and the 16th largest banking institution in the world, “created a market-leading global payments platform that did not previously exist in the market.”
Implementation of this platform led to an enviable 70% average improvement of key performance indicators around client implementation time, transaction processing, and connectivity.
As a global financial institution with footprints and clients in multiple geographies, Santander faced many challenges in providing a consistent payment or service experience across regions to its corporate clients, including navigating the local payments network and regulatory mandates for 15 countries on 3 continents.
Santander launched Cash Nexus, partnering with iGTB and using its Payments Service Hub, a channel for corporate collection and payment transactions in various countries, using international standard formats such as ISO20022. It is a single payments platform for all global regions that provides Santander’s clients global visibility into accounts from this single platform, available through multiple channels, from which they can initiate and track all incoming and outgoing payments. It also provides agility to Santander in on-boarding new customers – while reducing time to market. As a result of this successful initiative, Santander was not only able to create a differentiated and superior client experience for its corporate clients, but create impressive, quantified results:
- reduce average client implementation time by about 70%
- increase transaction performance capabilities by an impressive 75%, and
- become self-sufficient in implementing new countries in 65% less time.
The platform provides Santander clients with a unified payment experience with robust payment capabilities to access local schemes for domestic and cross border transactional needs and helped Santander to bring future-forward functionality and roadmap – including access to instant payments, real time liquidity, API-based models and cloud based models – to the market.
The case study also highlights how iGTB’s market expertise and knowledge of the core markets Santander operates in (including Europe, the US and Latin America, specifically Brazil and Argentina that have complex regulatory environments and financial cultures) made it the vendor of choice for Santander in its transformation journey. If further calls out how the deep partnership and synergy between the two made these results possible, and shifted Santander’s position in the market to a true global payments leader.
José Luis Calderón, Head of Global Transaction Banking, Santander, commented, “Recognizing that changing the payment platform is changing the heart of the bank, the partnership between Santander and Intellect has allowed Santander to bring the heartbeat and finish line of the future into today’s reality.”
Christine Barry, Head of Banking and Payments Insights at Aité-Novarica, says, “The partnership between Santander and Intellect Global Transaction Banking has created a market-leading global payments platform that did not previously exist. With the implementation of this new platform, Santander was able to transform its earlier limitations, arising of its unique structure of local subsidiaries operating as independent financial institutions catering to local payment networks and regulations, into a clear market advantage, maintaining the local payment capabilities and relationships while creating a unified, single global payments platform. From a market perspective, the innovations reached through this partnership have created a new path for financial institutions to adopt a similar approach to streamline global operations, increase payments performance, penetrate local payment networks, and reduce client implementation timelines.”
Carlos Denche, Global IT Head for Global Transaction Banking, Santander, added, “Comparing the capabilities of new system with old one, the new system is much more flexible for operations to configure and operate, providing greater opportunity to run services in a way that accommodates how payments are evolving, readiness of further API connectivity, development of new payment tools, and more aggressive KPIs.”
Manish Maakan, CEO of iGTB, commented “What Santander has achieved is very impressive – to provide such a strong and consistent global customer service with rapid customer responses and catering to so many different country regimes. I am committed to corporate bank transformation and so I am delighted that iGTB played its part in the bank’s success from this single, global installation. This independent report adds another success story to validate our claim that the world’s best corporate banks bank on iGTB.”
