Santander achieves significant step in its transformation journey, transitioning its Corporate and Investment Banking platform to the cloud.
**Santander Transforms Banking Services with Gravity Platform**
Santander, one of the world's largest banks, is revolutionizing its core banking systems with the Gravity platform, a cloud-based solution designed to enhance agility, innovation, and customer-centricity.
The Gravity platform, a significant part of Santander's digital transformation strategy, is set to modernize the bank's IT infrastructure and leverage cloud technology to improve operational efficiency.
### Key Features and Benefits
1. **Cloud-Based Core Banking**: Gravity enables Santander to migrate its core banking systems to the cloud, making it the first major Western bank to operate entirely on cloud infrastructure. This transition allows for faster data analytics and service delivery, improving overall operational efficiency[1][4].
2. **AI Integration**: By leveraging Gravity, Santander can build a banking system that is as proficient in AI as it is in trust. This integration is crucial for developing sophisticated digital banking services that can adapt quickly to changing customer needs[1].
3. **Integration and Scalability**: The platform is instrumental in integrating new acquisitions, such as TSB in the UK, by streamlining customer account migration and reducing integration complexities associated with legacy systems[2][3].
4. **Cost Efficiency and Market Expansion**: Gravity helps reduce costs associated with maintaining outdated systems and allows for strategic expansion into new markets, such as enhancing Openbank's digital presence[1][3].
### Driving Innovation Across Different Markets
- **Digital Banking as a Growth Engine**: Santander uses its hybrid model to leverage both physical and digital channels. This approach fuels growth in areas like auto lending and wealth management by combining digital scale with the trust of brick-and-mortar branches[1].
- **Market Expansion and Customer Acquisition**: Openbank, a fully digital bank under Santander, has shown significant growth, such as reaching 110,000 customers in Mexico in less than four months. This demonstrates the potential of Gravity in expanding digital banking services across diverse markets[4].
- **Competitive Advantage in Traditional Banking Domains**: The integration of Gravity helps Santander compete more effectively in traditional banking services, such as mortgages and credit cards, by offering a modernized and efficient banking experience that rivals larger market players[2][3].
In addition, Gravity allows parallel processing, enabling the bank to run workloads on its existing core banking mainframe and in the cloud simultaneously. 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.
The migration to Gravity is helping Santander improve its customer experience, products, and services, and drive value using real-time analytics. Gravity, Santander's cloud-native core banking platform, is being used in Google Cloud, enabling the bank to deploy on both private and public clouds.
Santander's commitment to innovation has been recognized, with the bank being named the Most Innovative Bank in the world by Financial Times' The Banker, due to the successful deployment of Gravity. Dirk Marzluf, chief operating and technology officer at Santander, stated that innovation is at the heart of Santander's transformation, helping serve customers better while delivering profitable growth and value creation.
Santander is also making strides in sustainable finance, with a commitment to support €220 billion in green financing between 2019 and 2030. The bank aims to be the best open financial services platform, leveraging its digital capabilities to drive innovation and improve customer experiences.
1.Santander's implementation of the Gravity platform, a cloud-based solution, is not only modernizing its core banking infrastructure but also driving innovation in digital banking, potentially expanding its business in various markets.2. By leveraging technology such as cloud and AI through the Gravity platform, Santander aims to provide a more efficient and customer-centric finance service, ultimately enhancing its position in the digital banking sector.
