The experiences both good and bad that
Santander had during the integration of Abbey IT into its core
banking system have made its next major transition
easier.
The differences between the UK and Spanish banking sectors made
Abbey's integration to the Partenon platform complex. But now it is
complete and as a result of experience the integration of Alliance
& Leicester will be easier.
Juan Jose Kuntz, CEO at Santander's technology arm Isban in the
UK, said the integration was complex as a result of different
regulatory issues and customer behaviour.
He said for example people in the UK change their bank accounts
much more regularly than in Spain. The process for enrolling new
customers joining as a result had to be different.
"It was complex because of these differences but the [Partenon]
system was flexible enough [to take in these differences]," said
Kuntz.
He said the system was designed in a way that enables the system
to be changed to suit particular requirements. "We could create
products very rapidly and tailor them to fit needs."
Partenon enables Santander staff to be able to access all
customer information from one point rather than having to access
multiple legacy systems. This is known as straight through
processing.
The migration of systems inherited through UK acquisitions to
its core banking platform will
pay dividends when it re brands its UK operations over the next
year.
Abbey completed the acquisition of Abbey last year. The bank
moved 10 million savings accounts, four million current accounts
and eight million card accounts to the new platform from Abbey
systems.
The bank has renewed its branch communications network by
building more than 45 portals for 26,000 employees and third-party
organisations, and has also created a back-up datacentre.
Santander bought Abbey in 2004. It acquired Alliance &
Leicester last year. Santander expects to make
£300m cost savings after integrating Abbey with Partenon. It
plans to make efficiency savings of between £30m and £50m by
integrating Alliance & Leicester with Partenon core banking
system.
The bank has learnt lessons from problems as well a successes.
In November 2007 the bank acknowledged that
service to customers has were disrupted. Staff could not access
various services and customers could not be served.
The bank said only a small number of customers had been
affected. But staff say they are under pressure because of
difficulties with the roll-out. Then in December last year it said
an IT upgrade that caused problems for customers was related to an
ongoing transformational programme.
Some Abbey small business customers were not able to see or make
transactions on certain accounts as systems were upgraded.