Santander is a leading financial services company in Argentina with 3.7 million clients, USD$11.6 billion in assets under management and 8,200 staff. Its impressive size requires a large workforce to effectively provide all the services that their clients expect. But after recruitment, it was taking six weeks to onboard new starters. Inefficient for everyone, Santander knew they needed to speed up the process. How did they do it? They employed a new kind of worker – a Blue Prism digital worker.

Challenge

Recruitment across Santander’s diverse operations is a constant process. But the real challenge arose when trying to onboard new starters. To get a new employee up and running, the bank had to perform many tasks, like establishing accounts and IT set-up, all of which required input from numerous departments. And as a financial services company, there were additional external regulatory checks. Performed manually and sequentially, the onboarding process took six weeks to complete. And with anywhere between 50 to 100 new employees starting each month, the challenge quickly compounded.

Solution

Since tasking HR staff with integrating new employees manually was taking too long, Santander hired Blue Prism intelligent digital workers. Now, as soon as an offer of employment has been made, digital workers run the onboarding process. They automatically inform the relevant departments, gather the required information, set up accounts, and perform the necessary compliance checks.

The result? A process that was taking six weeks is now completed in just two days. What’s more, this dramatic reduction has seen a jump in new employee NPS scores, helping Santander attract and retain more staff.

With the benefits of intelligent automation clearly established, Santander has now automated more than 350 processes across its operations. Because it’s adopted a reusable approach to asset development—storing over 500 objects which allow developers to rapidly roll out new automations—they’ve achieved all this in only four years. Santander is actively using intelligent automation outside of Argentina too. In fact, the bank has more than 1,000 processes live across the larger organization.

It’s impressive, to say the least, and it’s why Santander Argentina was recognized with the Americas Business Value Driver Customer Excellence Award.