Creating a centre of excellence for reconciliations
Santander is introducing shared service centres across its business to deliver operational best practice. Using TLM® Reconciliations at its centre, Santander has created a highly scalable centre of excellence, consolidating processes and systems to reduce operational risk and improve efficiency.
Company Overview
Spanish financial services firm Grupo Santander is one of the world’s largest banks, with 65 million customers globally through a network of retail focused banks. It is constantly examining how to benefit from economies of scale through the use of common platforms, such as its in-house developed core banking system Parthenon.
Business situation
As part of this strategy, Santander is creating shared service centres where it can develop and deliver operational best practices across its subsidiaries. With a fragmented back office infrastructure of manual, semi-automated and automated processes managed on a business line and geographic basis, reconciliations were chosen as the first element to use the service centre model.
Solution
TLM Reconciliations Premium were selected due to their business-critical nature, with Santander estimating it could centralise up to six million daily transactions. The project also served as a blueprint for subsequent shared centres that Santander is designing for payments and reference data. The centre, with TLM at its core, is reconciling Grupo Santander’s P&L records to produce timely and accurate monthly reports for Bank of Spain, and cash and securities reconciliations for Banco Santander and Banesto in Spain.
Key benefits
- Measure its performance more effectively and analyse where breaks occur in particular transaction types, business lines or branches
- Reduce risk through more effective exception management
