Banco Santander is taking another step in its transformation by migrating the Corporate & Investment Banking (Santander CIB) business to the bank’s new digital banking platform, Gravity. The bank has already successfully migrated all commercial customers in the UK and the consumer business in Chile without any service interruption. Santander CIB, which supports corporate and institutional clients, has used the Gravity platform to migrate to Google Cloud, where it manages more than a million accounting operations and half a million treasury operations per day.
Gravity, the bank’s software and cloud-native core banking platform, enables Santander to deploy on both private and public clouds. Santander plans to have migrated the vast majority of its core banking worldwide to the Gravity platform by the end of 2024, mostly in its private cloud.
Santander is the first major bank in the world with in-house software that digitizes core banking, the most critical part of a bank’s IT infrastructure. This transformation is allowing easier and faster access to data, more simplicity and faster time-to market, making it possible to deliver new capabilities for customers in hours, instead of weeks, and more frequent app updates. It also helps the bank improve greatly its customer experience, products and services, and drive value using real-time analytics. This change is also bringing significant efficiencies through cutting-edge end-to-end automation and other savings.
Dirk Marzluf, chief operating and technology officer at Banco Santander, said: “Innovation is at the heart of our transformation, helping us serve customers better while delivering profitable growth and value creation. The Gravity banking platform, and other examples across the group, are testament to this. The Santander CIB migration to the cloud is a new milestone in the group’s transformation towards a simpler, more integrated model, contributing to enhanced profitability.”
Santander’s core banking digital journey started in 2022 and the vast majority will be completed at the end of 2024. Apart from UK, Chile and Santander CIB, the transition is well advanced in Brazil. At the completion of the programme, more than one trillion technical executions will be managed every year by the Gravity platform within Santander’s systems.
Santander has been named the Most Innovative Bank in the world by Financial Times’ The Banker. The magazine has given the bank its highest recognition at their Innovation in Digital Banking Awards because of the bank’s successful deployment of Gravity, which is a “massive and ambitious project”.
The Gravity software allows parallel processing, meaning the bank can simultaneously run workloads on its existing core banking mainframe and in the cloud, allowing it to perform real-time testing with no disruption to its businesses. Once satisfied with the stability and performance, the bank can then transition from the mainframe system to the cloud.
These same capabilities are available globally to other companies in all industries with Dual Run by Google Cloud, a mainframe migration service that simplifies the transition from legacy mainframe systems to the cloud. Based on Santander’s Gravity technology, Dual Run has been further developed by Google Cloud’s engineers to encompass more use cases and optimize for Google Cloud.
Santander’s successful cloud-native core banking platform is built upon world-class capabilities thanks to the knowledge transfer of a large team of IT professionals, some of whom created the legacy system 20 years ago and are now moving it to the cloud, as well as young developers and engineers. This gives Santander’s 16,500 software developers and engineers a modern, high-performing environment to create customer-centric applications and increase the bank’s ability to attract top talent. Santander has also reduced the bank’s energy consumption from its IT infrastructure by 70%, contributing to its responsible banking targets.
