Banco Santander achieves milestone to Gravity Platform

Banco Santander, a prominent global bank, has achieved a major milestone with the successful migration of its corporate and investment banking business, Santander CIB, to its cutting-edge cloud-native core banking platform, Gravity. Launched in May 2022, Gravity has played a pivotal role in facilitating this transition, with the platform now operational on Google Cloud.

The transition to Google Cloud using the Gravity platform is marked by its impressive management of approximately one million accounting operations and half a million treasury operations each day. Notably, the bank reports a seamless migration experience, having already successfully moved all commercial customers in the UK and the consumer business in Chile without any service interruptions.

Looking ahead, Banco Santander aims to complete the full migration by the end of the next year, with the ongoing transition of its Brazilian operations described as “well advanced.” Once completed, the Gravity platform is expected to handle over one trillion technical executions annually, showcasing the scale and efficiency of the platform.

The bank envisions numerous benefits arising from this migration, including heightened data efficiency, enhanced product agility, and the ability to leverage real-time analytics for more informed decision-making. Gravity’s distinctive feature of parallel processing has been a key factor in running workloads simultaneously on both mainframe and cloud, ensuring minimal disruption during service migrations.

Banco Santander’s strategic collaboration with Google Cloud has not only benefited its own operations but has also extended to the broader industry. The partnership has resulted in the creation of the Dual Run service, introduced in October 2022, enabling companies to smoothly migrate from legacy mainframe systems to the cloud, mirroring the success of Santander CIB’s migration.

Dirk Marzluf, Chief Operating and Technology Officer at Banco Santander, describes the migration of Santander CIB to the cloud as a “new milestone.” He emphasises the bank’s commitment to a simpler, more integrated model, foreseeing positive contributions to overall profitability for the group.

In conclusion, Banco Santander’s successful migration to the Gravity platform on Google Cloud signifies a strategic move towards modernisation, efficiency, and technological advancement in its banking operations. The impact is not limited to the bank itself but extends to the industry through the services made available in collaboration with Google Cloud.