BOSTON - Oct. 1, 2007 - Today at Sibos 2007, Microsoft Corp. announced that Grupo Santander, the world's 10th-largest financial group by market value, has chosen to use Microsoft technology as part of its strategic payments infrastructure. Source: https://news.microsoft.com/2007/10/01/grupo-santander-selects-microsoft-technology-for-its-enterprise-payments-infrastructure/

1. Grupo Santander Selects Microsoft
Technology for Its Enterprise
Payments Infrastructure
October 1, 2007 |
BOSTON — Oct. 1, 2007 — Today at Sibos 2007,
Microsoft Corp. announced that Grupo Santander, the
world’s 10th-largest financial group by market value, has
chosen to use Microsoft® technology as part of its
strategic payments infrastructure. The solution, due to
go live during the next year, will see the consolidation of
the Group’s individual banks’ payments systems from
multiple mainframes into one homogeneous IT
infrastructure.
The consolidated payments system will utilize Microsoft
BizTalk® Server 2006 as part of its core, as well as
Microsoft SQL Server™, Microsoft BizTalk Accelerator for
SWIFT, and Web services, to enable faster payment
process times, reduce operating costs and bring
significant cost efficiencies to the entire Grupo
Santander. The initial phase of the project will see the
Group’s larger banks — Banco Santander S.A., Abbey
National plc and Banesto S.A. — implementing the
technology first, followed by the smaller banks and
building societies in the Group. The Microsoft-based
core payments system will enable connectivity and
transactions processing for Single European Payments
Area (SEPA), connecting to the Euro Banking Association
(EBA) and UK Faster Payments.
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2. Grupo Santander is currently developing different
projects that will culminate in a common payment
infrastructure for the whole Group. These include STP
Manager, a system designed to handle all financial
message interchanges between the Group and external
institutions; Faster Payments, a key initiative that will
significantly increase the speed of credit transfer from
one account to another, enabling Internet and
telephone banking users to benefit from near-real-time
payment processing; and SMS Text Messages Banking,
which will offer new services to mobile users, increasing
customer loyalty and the bank’s revenue.
In addition to a core infrastructure for domestic and
non-domestic payments services, it is anticipated that
the project will also bring the Group further benefits,
including the ability to receive payments information in
a variety of formats by consolidating interfaces with the
various Automated Clearing Houses (ACH) and
corporates it is connected to. The system’s flexibility will
enable the payments engine to be modified and routing
rules to be altered as required. In addition, having one
global payment infrastructure will allow the Group to
move payments processing from batch to online.
“Having explored and evaluated various solutions, we
chose Microsoft technology after the Group’s
architecture team ran a proof of concept at the
company’s headquarters in Redmond that proved the
system would be able to handle 62 million messages per
day, with processing rates of 1,156 messages per
second,” said Maite Agujetas, chief architect of Grupo
Santander. “The speed of the system and the potential
cost savings that could be achieved across the Group as
a result helped us come to our decision. In addition, we
believe that this project will help us easily adapt our
current systems with minimal disruption to our
customers.”
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3. “Enterprise payments is a complex and rapidly evolving
area. Regulation, compliance, security and technology
are all matters affecting the global payments business,”
said Sheida Hadji-Ashrafi, worldwide industry manager
payments at Microsoft. “Grupo Santander has been
looking for a more flexible, open architecture to respond
faster to those requirements driven by new EU financial
regulations. Microsoft is very pleased to be the platform
of choice of Grupo Santander, providing an integrated
and flexible infrastructure that will be capable of
adapting to the changing market demands as well as
reducing costs and inefficiencies from existing systems.”
About Microsoft in Financial Services
Microsoft’s Financial Services group helps financial firms
leverage technology to amplify the impact their people
can deliver to drive business success. We help our
customers in banking, capital markets/securities, and
insurance achieve four business outcomes: develop
relationships, drive innovation, improve operations and
build connections. To do this, we focus our products and
technologies, and our work with leading solutions,
services and hardware partners, on key areas where we
believe we and our partners can deliver exceptional
value; those areas include advisor platforms, channel
renewal, core banking, insurance value chain, investment
management, risk management and compliance, and
payments. More information can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/financialservices
(http://www.microsoft.com/financialservices).
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the
worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that
help people and businesses realize their full potential.

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