Bankinter Global Service

As a result of the strategy adopted last year, Bankinter's operating service and technology company was exclusively dedicated to internal functions in 2016. One of its primary challenges was to contribute to the integration of the Barclays retail business that was acquired in Portugal, aligning its infrastructure and organization with the rest of the Group.

From a technology point of view, Bankinter Global Services undertook a significant deployment to ensure that on 1 April – the date of the change of ownership – every Portuguese branch office, and all other customer relationship channels, such as websites and mobile apps, and even stationery, would bear the corporate image of the bank.

The central computer, servers and other communication infrastructure were gradually moved from the United Kingdom to Spain.

With respect to operations, it was assured that from 1 April, support that had previously been provided from the UK would be done from Spain with no incidences, including market activity, international business, accounting and so on.

Also, an initial review of the most important processes was made in order to assist in the launch of the business in Portugal, including mortgage processing, customer registration, etc., in order to bring them into line with those of Spain, shorten waiting times and drive the business. In addition to assisting in the integration of Portugal, the two major fields of specialisation of Bankinter Global Services continued to work to help different areas of the bank to provide services of ever higher quality:

• Technology. It made advances with respect to the automation of processes that allow for the issuance of all information required by regulators (Bank of Spain, CNMV); the creation of a new platform for financing purchases from the point of sale and the development of means of payment for small consumers. Private Banking was provided with specific support in the commercialisation of its products through different channels.
• Operations. We undertook an analysis of the operational processes of the network and the central services in order to migrate them to a new tool in 2017 that will enable us to ensure efficiency and agility in administrative tasks, so as to relieve branch offices of such tasks and enable the branches to become genuine centres of business. The entire suppliers policy was reviewed, with a change in 60% of the outsourced services, where the improvements and savings will begin to materialise in 2017.

In 2017, Bankinter Global service plans to complete the integration of Portugal. To do so, it will complete the assumption by Spain of the technology infrastructure of Portugal; it will replace its obsolete personal computers and upgrade to those being used in Spain; it will continue to unify procedures and also apply there a stricter supplier policy.

As a general rule, the company will continue to provide support to strategic plans for consumer finance, Private Banking and Partnet Banking, while also fostering joint operations between Portugal and Spain.