Case Study
European bank transforms consumer financing to improve automobile purchasing
CHALLENGE
Driving growth through multi-country API solutions
A leading European multinational bank focused on enterprise automotive manufacturing clients, needed to innovate within the consumer finance arena and saw an opportunity to seamlessly connect automotive buyers, manufacturers, and financial lenders. In addition, bank executives looking to expand business across Europe knew a multi-country, multi-party product platform would be required to facilitate a growth strategy across new automaker clients.
TRANSFORMATION
Overcoming challenges of selling into markets with country-specific requirements
Providing automation to the core banking products that automotive manufacturers require meant giving them access to core banking functionality — but the lack of standards for API definitions and country-specific API infrastructure created barriers to deployment. Due to the country-specific backend, each product required its own transformation to satisfy needs of automakers while fast-tracking the bank’s expansion across Europe.
Partnering with UST, the team implemented a plug-and-play solution from the bank’s automotive lending segment with a prioritized roadmap of API service offerings. First, methodology, best practices, and design patterns to build a flexible and secure API management platform were set. Then a solution designed with a robust, secure API service layer was deployed to the bank’s cloud platform and microservices releases were streamlined through a continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) process. This allowed for a flexible solution that adapted to changes in requirements while rapidly extending new API services to automotive manufacturing clients. A dedicated 24/7 support desk was also established to address issues and serve as a point-of-contact for accelerated deployment to automotive manufacturing clients.
IMPACT
Driving growth across borders
The integration model streamlined product releases and rapid onboarding of new automotive clients, resulting in double digit revenue growth and due to cloud hosted microservices, a 20% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO). In addition, release cycle times were lowered from months to days and a marked increase in time-to-market for new services was achieved. As a result, Santander expanded the platform from one partner in three countries to 12 partners in 9 nine countries in less than 12-months.