MADRID and SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 13,
2019 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Banco Santander
today announced a five-year global technology agreement valued at
approximately $700M to enable
Santander Group to accelerate and deepen its business
transformation.
The agreement - while providing annual savings for the bank
on IT spend - will significantly enable Santander Group to evolve
towards the open, flexible and modern IT environment it requires to
materialize the pivotal role that technology and digital
capabilities play in its business strategy. Together with that
modernization journey, essential to provide new efficiencies to the
bank's operations, the agreement will also boost Santander's
capability to deliver innovative services to its customers.
To that end, Santander will be able to enrich its services and
applications with IBM's most innovative and disruptive
technologies, such as AI, blockchain and big data, all supported by
security advanced solutions. Using IBM Watson, for instance,
Santander is incorporating AI capabilities to improve customer
experience, enhance branch advisors expertise and increase employee
productivity.
The agreement strengthens IBM's role as one of Santander Group's
main transformation partners. In that role, IBM is providing
additional solutions and expertise aimed to fundamentally support
Santander strategic objective of building the most advanced IT
architecture of the financial sector.
The basis of that architecture is the journey towards a hybrid,
multicloud environment. To implement Santander's hybrid cloud
strategy, the bank created its own Cloud Competence Center. IBM is
collaborating with the center in the definition of the
methodologies and processes to accelerate that transformation
journey. Additionally, the bank is using a range of technologies
including IBM DevOps solutions and IBM API Connect, aimed to
develop, iterate and launch new or upgraded applications and
digital services much more rapidly.
IBM is also contributing to a key requirement of Santander's
transformation process: to ensure they conform with the highest
level of commercial security as designated by the US government for
data, applications and services. The use of IBM Security tools, in
areas like mobile applications and incident response, will help
Santander's to strengthen the security of its customers and
operations.
"This agreement will allow us to have a global partner with the
best technology to help accelerate the IT transformation. We think
this agreement with IBM represents a great support to our strategy
of constant progress, while protecting our investments in
technology. IBM's technology will provide the bank with the
flexibility needed to support the constantly evolving business of a
bank," says David Chaos, Santander Global CIO.
"Santander Group is leveraging IBM technologies to support their
security and regulatory work, and to rapidly develop new services
that meet emerging customer demand by tapping into IBM's unique
technology and industry expertise," said David Soto, IBM General Manager for Santander
Group.
Banco Santander (SAN SM, STD US, BNC LN) is a leading
retail and commercial bank, founded in 1857 and headquartered in
Spain. It has a meaningful
presence in 10 core markets in Europe and the Americas, and is the largest
bank in the euro zone by market capitalization. At the end of 2018,
Banco Santander had EUR 981 billion
in customer funds (deposits and mutual funds), 144 million
customers, 13,000 branches and 200,000 employees. Banco Santander
made attributable profit of EUR 7,810
million in 2018, an increase of 18% compared to the previous
year.
About IBM Think
At Think 2019, IBM will outline new
offerings, client engagements, partnerships, technology
breakthroughs and developer tools that underscore how IBM and
partners are changing the way the world works. For more
information, visit the IBM Think 2019 Newsroom:
https://newsroom.ibm.com/think. Follow the conference on Twitter at
#think2019 and @ibmlive, and go to
https://www.ibm.com/events/think/ for the full schedule and
live streaming agenda.
Gabrielle Gugliocciello
IBM Cloud Communications
Phone: 314-494-8715
Email: gguglio@us.ibm.com
Tineke Mertens
IBM Communications
Mob. + 31 6 200 150 92
tineke.mertens@nl.ibm.com
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SOURCE IBM