CW+ Premium Content/CW Europe

Spanish bank Banco Santander has pulled out of its multi billion pound agreement to take over 316 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) branches, and the customers associated with them, because of IT integration problems. But sources say that IT problems can always be sorted out and the claims might be an excuse to pull out of the deal. Partly-nationalised RBS has been forced to sell assets by the government, after being saved from collapse during the bank rescue package in 2008. Banco Santander is no stranger to huge projects to migrate customers to its system. It gains huge advantages by standardising its operations on its Partenon core banking platform. Acquisitions in the UK – including Abbey and Alliance & Leicester – were migrated to the platform. Chris Skinner, chairman of the Financial Services Club, said that RBS has claimed all the data has been separated and it is a case of putting it on Banco Santander’s core banking platform Partenon. He said an Accenture report has revealed that the migration of the retail customer details ...