Santander signs $700M deal with IBM to accelerate its transformation

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.

Banco Santander is headquartered in Spain, but it is a global bank. It is the largest bank in the Eurozone in terms of market capitalization. It has 144 million customers, 200,000 employees and 13,000 branches. It also reported $900 million in profit in 2018.  

Santander Group is looking 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”, a press release from IBM stated. To that end, Santander will utilize IBM’s capabilities in areas such as AI, blockchain and big data, all supported by security advanced solutions. 

“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.

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. Santandar will be looking to movetowards a hybrid, multi-cloud 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.

Santander’s has said that one of its main goals is to ensure the strongest level of security of data, applications and services. “Santander Group is leveraging IBM technologies to successfully meet security and regulatory guidelines, 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.