Santander Consumer Bank belongs to the Spanish Santander Group present in Poland since 2001. It offers a wide range of credit products for individual clients and entrepreneurs. It conducts sales through 321 branches and a network of cooperating outlets - over 27,000 stores and supermarkets and 1,000 car dealerships.
The dynamic growth and high sales volumes of financial products led Santander Consumer Bank to look for a solution that would allow for digitization of the process of concluding credit agreements. The institution wanted to increase the speed, efficiency and convenience of nearly 30 thousand commercial partners’ advisors, who serve 350 thousand clients per year. It also wanted to improve the quality of service and streamline the existing „paper” workflow, which was not only time-consuming, but also prolonged the time of issuing a decision to grant a loan or its payment. This required the use of IT solutions compliant with eIDAS, the EU regulation specifying requirements for signatures and electronic transactions. In order to implement this project the bank chose Asseco, the leader of the trust services market in Poland. The company was responsible for implementing trust services and providing full support, which in- cluded technological, legal and organizational aspects.
The first part of the project, which began in December 2019, was the analysis of the existing process of concluding credit agreements, as well as the identification of Santander Consumer Bank’s needs and requirements for the new system. The system had to meet high security requirements of the delivered products in order for the components implemented in the bank’s infrastructure to ensure full confidentiality of the signed loan agreements.
The project covered the implementation of Asseco’s security and trust products and services:
- Trust Gateway (Signature and Validation) used in the signing and validation process respectively, along with components for advanced one-time signatures
- Dedicated web application enabling electronic signatures on credit agreements
- An advanced one-time SMS signature for the author- ization of contracts by customers
- Qualified seal in the SimplySign service to authorize contracts on behalf of the bank
- Qualified validation service
After the completion of the main work on the system, a pilot was carried out, which was attended by a selected group of business partners’ advisors. In the next stage, Santander Consumer Bank, in cooperation with Asseco, began the gradual implementation of the new solution throughout the entire sales network.
The project was carried out with the use of the SCRUM methodology, which means that subsequent elements of the solution were delivered incrementally and iteratively. Owing to that the client could verify the progress of work at every stage.
The electronic process of concluding credit agreements was launched across the entire network in November 2020 and was carried out by the combined teams of Santander Consumer Bank and Asseco, consisting of 20 experts each.
Key benefits
- By digitizing the confirmation of credit documentation, the bank has improved the quality of provided services and shortened the time of service for customers who can now remotely conclude a credit agreement using advanced one-time signatures authorized by SMS codes. Thanks to that they can receive the credit much faster, without unnecessary paperwork.
- The introduction of paperless processes has allowed to relieve the backoffice and reduce the space occupied by paper contracts. Digital document workflow also eliminated the need for manual data entry into the system, thus reducing the occurrence of possible errors.
- The Santander Consumer Bank’s* study shows that the implementation of the electronic sales process has shortened the time to conclude a credit agreement by 30%. It has also contributed to the improvement of the quality of work of advisors in the bank’s partner network. 80% of advisors emphasized the ease of the new process and 40% appreciated the possibility of concluding a credit agreement without using a single card.
- The Asseco’s solutions have ensured a high level of security and full confidentiality of signed loan agreements. In addition, it has improved internal processes. Santander Consumer Bank has also gained the opportunity to better analyze product sales in a much shorter time. Thanks to the knowledge of contract values and volumes or sales targets achieved, it is now able to make quicker decisions on partner network management.
*Voice of Customer research carried out with the use of CATI technology, conducted by Santander Consumer Bank with Commercial Partners in the period August 15, 2020 and September 15, 2020. The research was conducted on a sample of 345 sellers who have the possibility to use a digital signature.
