Santander strikes five year $700m deal with IBM in money-saving cloud migration move

Spanish banking group to adopt IBM DevOps, Watson AI and other IBM tools as it shifts to hybrid multi-cloud environment

Spanish banking group Santander has struck a five year, $700 million deal with IBM as part of a digital transformation involving a migration to a hybrid, multi-cloud IT environment.

IBM will be working with Santander's Cloud Competence Centre to help it in the shift to the cloud to help define the methodologies and processes that will support the migration. It's unclear, however, how much of the bank's IT infrastructure will be shifted to the cloud. The bank does, though, claim to be building "the most advanced IT architecture" in the financial sector.

Santander claims that the deal will include the implementation of a range of IBM software, services and technologies, including its Watson AI in customer service, security in the areas of mobile applications and incident response, blockchain, and analytics.

The bank created its own blockchain research team last year, called the Digital Investment Banking team, to examine the potential of blockchain for securities trading and other financial instruments, according to specialist cryptocurrency website Cointelegraph.

At the time, José Linares, Santander's global head of Corporate and Investment Banking, said: "The wave of digitalization that is occurring in the financial industry is accelerating.

"Our clients expect this to result in better solutions, lower costs and new categories of products and services that enable them to access capital markets more efficiently than ever before."

The bank is also explicit that the deal will also save money on its annual IT spending.

"We think this agreement with IBM represents a great support to our strategy of constant progress, while protecting our investments in technology. IBM's technology will provide the bank with the flexibility needed to support the constantly evolving business of a bank," said Santander's global CIO David Chaos.