Santander reduced onboarding time by up to 80%.

The Company

Santander Group is a diverse retail and commercial bank with over 188,000 employees and 125 million customers.

Industry: Banking
Product: Adverse Media via API
Awards won: 2019 Financial Innovation Awards: Best Innovation in Product or Service Design for Corporate Digital Onboarding

The Challenge

To outdo the digital experiences championed by fintech proponents, Santander UK needed to significantly reduce the cycle time to onboard customers while also monitoring anti-money laundering controls. The bank needed to move away from workloads usually managed through paper-based labor and automate as much of the customer-facing process as possible.

Where the public information regarding a customer application wasn’t available, the bank needed to screen against high volumes of adverse information and media to verify the entity and better understand their financial risk profile.

Santander UK was looking to innovate its technology stack in the corporate bank, moving as much as possible off-premise and into the cloud.

Settings within the API are configurable, meaning Santander UK can change thresholds, search strings or any other relevant information as required. Analysts at Santander UK now always have the correct information at their fingertips to make more informed decisions. Difficult manual processes have become a thing of the past, and Santander UK can adapt to regulatory changes and business strategy at a moment’s notice.

The Outcome

Using ComplyAdvantage as part of their digital proposition meant that, overall, Santander UK has been able to cut the customer onboarding cycle time from 12 days mean cycle time to 2 days.

They have also been able to cut process time for both customers and colleagues by more than 50% in most cases and, at times, up to 75 or 80%. Actions that would ordinarily waste compliance officers’ time have been automated, and the compliance team can now focus on addressing other threats to the business.

Santander UK now runs adverse information and media screening on all entities associated with a corporate or SME onboarding case.

Awards

• Santander (UK) was awarded Best Innovation in Product or Service Design for Corporate Digital Onboarding at the Financial Innovation Awards 2019.
• Celent recognized Santander (UK) as the winner of the Model Bank 2019 Commercial Customer Onboarding Award for their initiative Taking Onboarding to the Next Level.