This key milestone places Santander in the leading position among large European banks with the greatest proportion of IT infrastructure on the cloud. The programme improves processes, enables fast innovation and is improving service quality significantly.

Santander's cloud platform is elevating customer experience by using modern technologies that deliver customer centric and innovative services and applications with better response times. For example, in some cases ATM response times have reduced from as much as 10 to 20 seconds in the past to nearly instantaneous today. Additionally, today the bank is delivering new capabilities to its customers in hours instead of several days in the past.

Santander is also using cloud to support the development of its most disruptive payment services with PagoNxt, a new, autonomous cloud-native company the bank has created. Thanks to this technology, PagoNxt is quickly building global platforms in a more secure way to serve customers in the best possible manner.

Santander provided its 148 million customers across Europe and the Americas with access to vital financial services during the pandemic using cloud technology. The bank was able to migrate seamlessly to home working for more than 100,000 employees in just days. The cloud also helped Santander manage the significant increase in digital activity in 2020 (+60%), an ongoing trend this year.

Santander aims to complete its cloud migration by 2023 to become a fully digitally-enabled bank that delivers world-class, digital services supported by experts at branches.

Dirk Marzluf, chief operating and technology officer at Banco Santander, said: “Helping customer and creating the best customer experience is key for Santander. To achieve this, we are innovating and moving our services to the most advanced cloud-based platforms. Our cloud adoption is one of the fastest in the world by a global company: we have moved 200 servers to the cloud every working day over the last two years. So we are progressing every day to become the best open financial services platform.”

Santander’s successful cloud platform is built upon world-class capabilities - both in house and through third-party providers. This enables the bank to be innovative, flexible, agile, cost efficient while ensuring the protection of data and assets. It also gives Santander’s 16,500 software developers and engineers a modern, high-performing environment to create customer-centric applications and increases the bank’s ability to attract top talent. For example, last year the bank hired 3,000 engineers.

Santander’s cloud roll-out is helping the bank to become the best open financial services platform. This programme also reduces the bank’s energy consumption for the IT infrastructure by 70%, contributing to Santander’s responsible banking targets.