Santander Consumer Bank is a Nordic commercial bank that offers car financing, loans, credit cards and savings products.
The bank has a long history in Norway and, as one of the largest banks in the world, Santander combines local presence with global strength.
Itera has collaborated closely with Santander across various work streams for a long time.
For this delivery, an interdisciplinary team from Itera helped Santander to make car financing easier for both car dealers and their customers.
A better customer experience
Santander aims to be a leader in digital car financing across all channels – online, on mobile and at car dealers’ premises. As a major player in the Nordic market, the company provides car dealers and their customers with a range of solutions across international borders.
The purpose of this delivery was therefore to bring together all Santander’s services into a shared Nordic solution – and so to enable it to provide a better customer experience as well as more services from which both car dealers and their customers could benefit.
Quick, high-quality deliveries
The delivery was carried out during a period in which the pandemic made normal ways of working impossible. With working from home as the new normal, the team worked from a range of locations. It was important to ensure good communication both within the team and between the team and the customer.
Focusing on progress, close dialogue with the customer and a good workflow were important.
– Itera has years of experience of working in distributed teams. We were therefore well-equipped when the pandemic hit, and we found that digital discussions with the customer worked very well throughout the entire delivery. It was extremely satisfying to help put in place solutions that could well be ground-breaking for an entire industry.
Ann Kristin Lilja
Delivery Manager, Itera
An agile team was crucial
Critical factors for the success of the delivery included ensuring there were well-defined roles and a clear division of responsibilities, as well as holding frequent workshops, sharing knowledge and exchanging expertise. As a result, Santander found the collaboration to be good value. A key person from Santander summarised it as follows:
– A high level of quality at an impressive speed.
In order to help Santander find new solutions, Itera provided an agile and interdisciplinary team whose members had expertise in architecture, design, frontend, backend, testing and project management (Scrum). The team was scaled up and down as required in order to be able to ensure a wide range of expertise for key tasks.
Being able to work in an agile way using a distributed model involving employees from both the customer and the supplier was crucial in such unusual times. The team worked closely with Santander’s own employees, other teams from Itera and external suppliers.
– The collaboration worked really well. The team was not afraid of bringing in people not involved in the delivery, and they did this in a way that I found both practical and positive. From my perspective, I see Itera’s team virtually as Santander employees.
The delivery comprised two new services that make it easier for both car dealers and their customers to arrange car financing: Checkout and Quotation.
Checkout is a digital solution for submitting loan applications, while Quotation calculates the cost of loans. Quotation also provides car dealers with information on what loan products and prices are available – which is essential in order for them to build validation into their own loan calculators.
Santander has developed an innovative, digital car financing solution that is integrated with car dealers’ websites and that makes it possible for new partners and car dealers to be onboarded as an automatic and self-service process.
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