Spanish banking giant Banco Santander is planning to integrate
Alliance & Leicester with its core banking system after
Santander and the UK building society agreed a £1.3bn
take-over.
Santander expects to make efficiency savings of between £30m and
£50m by integrating Allance & Leicester with Partenon core
banking system.
The move follows Santander's take over of Abbey in 2004.
Santander's expects to make £300m cost savings after integrating
Abbey with Partenon.
"Santander believes that it is possible to realise substantial
benefits by transferring Alliance & Leicester's operations to
Partenon, its proprietary IT platform, and integrating its back
office functions with those of Abbey," it said in a statement.
"The implementation of Partenon at Abbey is now reaching its
final stages and Santander is now ready to integrate Alliance &
Leicester."
Alliance & Leicester had been in the
process of moving to Accenture's Alnova banking platform,.
Alnova was designed to replace Alliance and Leicester's systems
used for current and savings account customers and loans and
commercial banking business.
Santander's strategy to acquire companies and integrate them
into the Partenon core banking platform. It aims to reduce costs
and improve efficiency through the creation of a single view of
customers.
A spokesman at Alliance & Leicester said it was too early to
comment on IT plans.
According to Ralph Silva, analyst at Towergroup, Santander there
is a question about how Santander will move Alliance and Leicester
over to Partenon.
"The question is will it put Alliance & Leicester as an
extension of the Abbey version of Partenon or create a new
version," he said. "If it becomes an extension of the Abbey system
the only system that will have to be changed is the mortgage system
because it will not have the capacity to take in all the Alliance
and Leicester mortgages."
Santander is in the process of
completing the integration of UK bank Abbey, which it acquired
in 2004, to its global banking platform Partenon.