Banco Santander has hired former Google exec Aiaz Kazi to fill a newly-created role as chief platform officer with responsibility for helping the bank to improve the way it delivers products and services to customers.
Kazi will work with Santander's global technology division across the bank's ten core market to help shape its digital transformation strategy.
Santander in February struck a five-year year global technology agreement with IBM as part of the bank transition to a hybrid, multicloud environment. The bank has created its own Cloud Competence Centre to implement its strategy and is also using IBM DevOps and IBM API Connect to help develop, iterate and launch applications and services more rapidly.
At Google, Kazi acted as platform head for Google Cloud, following a long stint at SAP where he worked on the creation of new cloud-based services for in-memory database Sap Hana.
Says Kazi: "I join Santander at a truly exciting moment in its 160-year history. I'm eager to apply my experience to build an open financial services platform business delivering on Santander's bold vision