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Banco Santander Consumer Portugal Adopts the OutSystems Platform

Banco Santander Consumer Portugal selected OutSystems to power its ambitious digital transformation program in 2017. Working with OutSystems partner KPMG, the bank had replaced 70% of its core systems by the beginning of 2020. With a new agile IT architecture, the bank is now able to innovate at speed, to launch new channels and solutions.

“The OutSystems development approach has greatly contributed to the success of the program. It has improved our agile practices and helped us involve business users in a much more responsive way.” - Domingos FerreiraIT & Operations Director, Banco Santander Consumer Portugal

Challenge

Struggling to Adapt to a Rapidly Changing Market

Banco Santander Consumer Portugal, part of Santander Group, a top-10 global financial services group, provides credit solutions to consumers both directly and via leading consumer goods and automotive partners. In Portugal, Santander Consumer financed loans totaling 465 million Euros in 2018.

Santander Consumer was struggling to adapt to a fast-changing market. Successive mergers and acquisitions had led to a complex IT architecture, which added cost and delays to every IT related improvement or innovation.

Santander Consumer faced increasing competition, and the bank's business strategy was to diversify and become a major player in the consumer loan and insurance markets.

The bank's leadership realized that it needed to escape the inertia imposed by its hard-to-change legacy IT, to speed-up the launch of new products, services, and digital experiences.

"Working with OutSystems and KPMG, we have built a new IT architecture, replaced 70% of our core systems, and streamlined our operations. We are now executing the business vision and delivering new digital channels and solutions to lead in the consumer finance market.” - Domingos FerreiraIT & Operations Director, Banco Santander Consumer Portugal

Why Santander Consumer chose OutSystems:

Speed-up development and improve agility
No lock-in, open standards-based platform
Powerful integration

Solution

An OutSystems Powered Digital Transformation

In 2016, Santander Consumer put together a company-wide task-force to digitally transform every aspect of the business, including products, processes, channels, compliance, and IT. KPMG were appointed to help deliver the transformation program between 2017 to 2019.

Following an extensive evaluation, OutSystems was selected as the low-code application development platform to refresh the bank’s technology. Key selection criteria included:

Fit for agile development practices
Support for API integration and microservices
Ease and speed of development
No lock-in, or development limits

Santander Consumer’s Management was also impressed that the OutSystems team quickly grasped the full extent of the proposed wide-ranging transformation program.

The digital transformation required a new, agile IT architecture to replace many of Santander Consumer’s 20-year old systems. Fundamental to this was the creation of an enterprise service bus, a new business process management layer, and new channels for all product stakeholders. All of these were to be developed on the OutSystems platform.

The new architecture enables fast and flexible development and maximizes the reuse of code across multiple products and channels. The bank is now able to quickly digitalize processes and streamline operations so that it can launch new products and channels in a much more efficient way.

These improvements and innovations are transforming the way that the bank operates and engages with partners and customers.

The “NeXt Future” program includes 47 distinct initiatives and 14 new solutions, developed in three years by an internal team of around 20 people, from IT, operations, and various business departments, and up to 40 people from KPMG.

Many reusable components have already transitioned to the new architecture, including:

A new end-to-end digital process for the onboarding of all products
User and access authentication
Communications and services gateway
Workflow services (for processes such as collections and fraud prevention)

In late 2018, the first solutions went live for consumer credit and personal loans, which are high priority growth targets for Santander Consumer. Other solutions built with OutSystems that are already in production include:

eCommerce – offering consumer credit products as a payment option in partner’s eCommerce portals
Digital cash loans – a consumer credit solution to provide personal credit
Complaint management solution
New durables dealer’s portal – a B2B digital solution that supports business acquisition through dealer networks (from simulation to payment).
New used car portal - A B2B solution that is helping the bank grow rapidly in this increasingly important business sector.

Santander Consumer has also built a new portal for auto dealers that, at the time of writing, is about to go live. This comprehensive solution will significantly simplify and improve the onboarding experience for auto dealers and their customers by enabling document upload and real-time status updates throughout the process.

The bank is also about to launch new fully-integrated solutions for credit recovery and associated litigation.

Partner

KPMG Advisory - Consultores de Gestão, S.A.

KPMG is one of the world's leading professional services firms. We are proud of our firm's strong and established reputation, a reputation that is built on a long history of independence, integrity...

Learn more about KPMG Advisory - Consultores de Gestão, S.A.

Results

Streamlined Operations That Improve the Customer Experience

By the beginning of 2020, Santander had replaced 70% of the processes that were in its legacy core systems. As Domingos Ferreira, IT & Operations Director, puts it, “In just three years, we have replaced and improved a technology architecture that took us 20 years to develop.”

However, technology change is not, in itself, the end-goal. The real achievement is the new-found agility that allows the bank to quickly launch new propositions to market, with streamlined, digitally-optimized processes, and significantly improved customer experience.

Moreover, higher customer satisfaction scores confirm that improved customer experiences are making a difference.

“The OutSystems development approach has greatly contributed to the success of the program,” says Domingos. “It has improved our agile practices and helped us involve business users in a much more responsive way.”

Cultural change goes hand-in-hand with Santander Consumer’s digital transformation, as the bank adopts a more customer-centric, agile approach to develop and deliver the products and experiences its partners and users need.

In summary, here are just a few of the achievements delivered over the three-year program:

Omnichannel solutions from simulation to payment
Front-end mobile-first and fully responsive digital experiences
Digital “Know Your Customer,” authentication and document signature
Integration with business partners via APIs
Single end-customer home banking
Digital assets shared across all products, channels, and partners
Established a modern, agile architecture that supports rapid innovation and lower cost of maintenance.

Technologies

Outsystems

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