go to homepage

New revenue streams through product bundling

Santander aims to be the leading provider of additional services to customers who own, lease, or subscribe to a car in the Nordics. Together with Itera, they have worked to develop new services.

The project in brief

Through an interdisciplinary and distributed team, and the use of agile development methods like Scrum, Itera has contributed to developing and improving additional services for car customers in the Nordics. With solid delivery management and a strong partnership, Itera has ensured efficiency, quality, and a solution that can be applied across the Nordics with one codebase.

About Santander

Santander in the Nordics is part of Banco Santander, one of the world's largest financial institutions. In the Nordics, the bank has 1,200 employees and 1.6 million customers. Santander is a market leader in car financing and offers a range of loan products, savings, and insurance.

 

Strategic focus on product bundling in car financing

Santander's core products in the Nordics are mobility through, among other things, financing and leasing of cars.

The initiative to bundle these products originally started in Sweden six years ago and quickly became a strategic focus area for the entire Nordic region.

Other industries, such as telecom, energy, and retail, have long traditions of bundling services. The concept has been adopted from these industries and implemented with adaptations for leasing and financing of cars at Santander, which is new and unique.

Innovation and growth through additional services in the Nordics

Santander has identified significant business potential in offering additional services, which have already proven successful in other industries.

With assistance from Itera, which has contributed to architectural improvements and further development of the solution over several years, Santander has implemented new functionalities aimed at both internal users and partners. The solution is now in production in Sweden and Finland and technologically ready for rollout in Denmark and Norway as soon as relevant partners are in place.

Currently, the additional services primarily focus on insurance, but plans are also underway for other services.

The solution is designed for customer-driven development, ensuring continuous innovation and adaptation to market needs.

Management of distributed teams

Santander wanted to improve the management of distributed teams across multiple countries. By taking on roles such as business analyst and Scrum Master, Itera acted as a link between the business side and IT, ensuring seamless collaboration and leading the delivery process with the necessary resources.

The use of agile methods like Scrum under Santander's SAFe-ARTs, along with tools like Azure DevOps, contributed to effective product development through project management, source control, build automation, testing, collaboration, and communication.

 

Improved delivery process and increased efficiency

Through close cooperation and coordination, the Scrum Master helped create a better, more structured, and predictable delivery process for Santander. This resulted in increased efficiency, risk minimization, and improved customer satisfaction. Any challenges were identified, addressed, and resolved. By actively taking responsibility for delivering results and driving development forward, the Scrum Master maintained a strong partnership between the business side and IT.

Today, the solution is in production in the Swedish and Finnish markets. The goal moving forward is to increase volume and eventually scale the solution to other Nordic markets as well.

The solution includes

among other things

Automatic collection of invoice transactions from third-party providers.

Integration of vendor transactions into Santander's standard customer invoices.

Sending notifications to vendors via API upon receipt of payment from customers.

Vendor control over transactions, including handling, changes, and crediting.

Enabling outgoing invoicing alongside vehicle financing for partners.

Let's talk about banking and insurance

Let's talk about banking and insurance
Simen Aasen Engebretsen
Head of Financial Services & Insurance

Simen Aasen Engebretsen