Banco Santander's migration of systems inherited with its UK
acquisitions to its core banking platform will pay dividends when
it rebrands its UK operations over the next year.
The Spanish bank, which has acquired companies in the UK such as
Abbey,
Bradford & Bingley and
Alliance & Leicester, will rebrand them as Santander by the
end of next year. Santander said that all its acquisitions will be
rebranded once they have been successfully migrated to its in-house
banking platform, Partenon.
Customers of the different parts of the business will be able to
use any of the 1,300 collective UK branches, which will operate
under a single core banking system.
António Horta-Osório, CEO of Santander in the UK, said the
switch to Santander's global IT platform has driven the brand
change. "Abbey has
moved to Partenon over the last three years. The experience
gained from this major project has enabled Santander to implement a
similar programme more quickly for B&B branches, and the group
expects to complete the switch of B&B's 338 branches by July
2009. A&L's 254 branches will migrate to the Partenon system by
the end of 2010."
"Alliance and Leicester will be rebranded last because the
integration to the Partenon platform is more complicated," said a
spokesman.
Bob McDowall, analyst at TowerGroup, said having a core banking
system such as Partenon makes it easier for banks to rebrand
acquisitions. "It could not have achieved what it has achieved
without it."
Banco Santander's strategy is to grow by acquisition and
integrate the IT operations of the firms it buys to its own
in-house platform, which uses in-house middleware called
Banksphere.
As well as rationalising IT, this creates cross-selling
opportunities and improves customer satisfaction and operational
performance. The platform uses a single database so all of a
customer's relationships with the bank are automatically linked
through a
single view of customers.
Partenon was a differentiator during takeover negotiations with
Abbey in 2004 because of performance improvements it offered the UK
bank, as well as expected cost savings of £300m.