Santander Consumer Bank, a subsidiary of Banco Santander, has saved over $2 million and more than 30,000 hours of work after partnering with Automation Anywhere, one of the world’s leading robotic process automation and intelligent automation platforms.
The success of Santander Consumer Bank’s automation initiative has been recognised in IDC European Future of Work Awards, winning the Future of Workforce category.
Initial pilot to full roll out in the Nordic region
After an initial pilot across Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland, Santander Consumer Bank set up a central team to manage the governance and structure of the bank’s RPA implementation.
The financial institution rapidly deployed 150 intelligent bots from Automation Anywhere running across four Nordic countries to deliver increased process efficiencies from the front office to the back-office.
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Manual to automation
Santander Consumer Bank offers personal loans, car finance, insurance and other financial services products to over two million customers in the Nordic Region.
Before implementing RPA, the processing of loans and financial applications was a time-intensive, manual process. By automating the process, Santander Consumer Bank was able to increase efficiency and improve the customer experience by processing and updating all account activity in real-time.
Santander estimates it saved more than 30,000 hours in processing time in 2019. The decrease in manual work has resulted in improved customer service and alleviated delays in account updates.
An additional benefit was enhanced employee satisfaction as time saved has allowed employees to spend more time with customers and meet service level agreements without having to work overtime.
“With the implementation of intelligent automation, our customers always win,” commented Nina Moller, Back Office Subject Matter Expert, Santander Consumer Bank.
“Employees are also freed up to focus on providing the best level of customer service, and the intelligent bots ensure information is available in real-time and with near 100% accuracy. Automation Anywhere’s platform is scalable, intuitive and easy to work with, which has enabled us to automate all front and back office processes and achieve great ROI in less than 12 weeks.”
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Cost savings
Alongside the day-to-day processes that have been automated by Santander, the bank undertook a large, complex one-off systems migration project converting data from one system to another.
The projected cost and timescale for an external vendor to complete the project was two years and $2 million. With automation and bots running 24/7, the migration was completed in just 12 weeks with no additional cost and near 100% accuracy.
The partnership and success of the programme has demonstrated the business value of intelligent automation. As a result, Santander plans to expand the use of bots from operations and finance to its compliance and human resource departments, where digital workers will operate alongside human counterparts.
“RPA and Intelligent Automation are powerful platforms to improve process efficiencies from the front office to the back office,” said Prince Kohli, CTO, Automation Anywhere.
“The intuitive and scalable nature of Automation Anywhere’s intelligent RPA platform empowers customers like Santander to achieve great business results in as little as a few weeks. We’re proud of what Santander has been able to achieve and congratulate them on winning the IDC Future of Work award.”
