Banking Innovation of the Month: Santander Spain app

Launching this year’s round of Qorus-Accenture Banking Innovation of the Month awards, we are pleased to announce our first winner: Santander’s new banking app, which combines simplicity with hyper-personalization to create a stellar user experience.

Building a banking app is a huge challenge. You have to offer the customer a maximum number of functionalities via a simple and intuitive interface, so that the customer is autonomous. And when that app also leverages data to provide a tailored customer experience, it's just perfect. It's hard to beat self-service banking.

Santander has long since made digital transformation a cornerstone of its strategy. Repositioning itself as a ‘digital bank with branches’, the Spanish multinational is combining its strengths as one of Europe’s largest traditional banks with technology to rival any neobank. 

The new Santander app is the product of many months of research and development, taking on board the results of extensive customer surveys. With 60% of the bank’s six million digital customers demanding fully digitalized self-service options, the app now offers end-to-end autonomous solutions for all banking operations – with human help always close at hand when needed or preferred. The in-app ‘Financial Coach’ allows customers to see in one place all their financial behavior, add any of their other banks, and see all their income and expenses classified by categories, along with other self-service solutions.

Hyper-personalization based on real-time data is a core feature of the new app, enabling Santander to have smarter digital conversations with the customer. The app can dynamically adapt, maximize experience and sales capabilities according to customer needs, with 60-80% of content and advertising changing based on circumstances, user needs and seasonality. Thanks to this new approach, Santander has also launched several cross-selling tools contextualized on different user journeys on the app.

Other innovative features include a cutting-edge global search tool with easy access from any point of the app, which has resulted in an increase in searches from 2M to 3M accesses per month in the Santander Spain app, and significant reductions in call center activity. Last but not least, simple but effective security has been achieved through constant refinement of the Santander Key, pairing biometrics with an advanced multi-factor system.

All these improvements have resulted in a strengthened market position against other competitors and a clear increase in customer satisfaction: by 2022, the Santander app’s score had increased from 3.8 to 4.7 (out of 5) in Android, while the 5-star rating was 10 times higher than previous years in the iOS store.

It’s great to see an incumbent leading the way in the digital transformation of financial services, and Santander’s innovation is a perfect choice to open this year’s Innovation in Banking Awards (Read the full case study).

Santander’s innovation will be automatically selected as a nominee for the Qorus-Accenture Banking Innovation Awards 2023. Submit your innovations on the Banking Innovation portal until 13th September. Participation is free of charge and open to all Qorus members.