Santander Corporate and Commercial appoints EQ Global to enhance its international payments offering
Santander Corporate and Commercial (Santander) has appointed EQ Global, the leading cross-border payments provider, to strengthen the bank’s international payments offering for UK-based SME clients.
Santander offers a wide range of personal and commercial financial products and services, serving more than 14 million active customers through its branch network and regional corporate business centres across the UK.
In a move to further strengthen its corporate customer proposition, the partnership will provide Santander’s customers with a more complete service and extended reach. This will enable businesses to make payments in 100 currencies to over 120 countries across the globe.
Furthermore, the partnership will increase the already impressive speed and efficiency at which international transactions can be made for the bank’s customers. The process will use EQ Global’s bespoke technology built to connect the banking and fintech sectors and support major banks of this size.
Michael Vallance, Managing Director and Head of Transaction Banking, Santander Corporate and Commercial Bank, said: “Santander has a clear strategy to help businesses prosper and to support our high growth clients to expand internationally, against a backdrop of record levels of international trade being undertaken by UK companies. Our recently published Santander Trade Barometer reaffirmed the importance of banks facilitating trade undertaken by their clients, in a climate of positive economic trends in globalisation, digitisation and mobility.
“A critical part of our product development and innovation strategy, is helping our clients make payments in different currencies and the accompanying reporting and reconciliation activities. The new international payments proposition developed in partnership with EQ Global allows us to extend our range of international payment currencies to market leading levels, giving our clients much greater choice in which currencies they are able to make payments, and providing strong levels of operational efficiency, cost competitiveness and improved reconciliation. After piloting the proposition in January, we aim for full go live from February 2018.”
Nick Pedersen, Managing Director of EQ Global, said: “Since rebranding ourselves as EQ Global in July 2017, we have continued to develop our product offering and have expanded our business through several key new hires. Working in partnership with the major banks is something we have been striving towards and we are thrilled to be providing Santander with the full breadth of our services.
“By successfully connecting two key entities in the banking and fintech sectors, Santander’s customers will see the benefits of a partnership resulting from strong individual capabilities, complementing each other efficiently and securely.
“With our partnership now in place, Santander will have an improved corporate customer experience that will hopefully bring about commercial benefits both in the short and long term, as well as ensuring its clients have an even more comprehensive and efficient cross-border payments process.”
About EQ Global
EQ Global is an expert global payments provider offering scalability and global growth opportunities for a multitude of industry sectors.
Founded upon a 150-year heritage of administrative and payments services under the Equiniti Group, EQ Global offers accuracy and security of bulk global payments using state of the art technology.
EQ Global helps businesses to send and receive payments to 180 countries in over 130 currencies, and with 99.9% straight through processing on payment delivery, processes hundreds of thousands of payments per year on behalf of global clients.
For further information, visit www.equinitiglobal.com
About Santander
Santander UK is a financial services provider in the UK that offers a wide range of personal and commercial financial products and services. It has brought real competition to the UK, through its innovative products for retail customers and relationship banking model for UK SMEs.
At 30 June 2017, the bank serves around 14 million active customers with c19,500 employees and operates through 826 branches (which includes 61 university branches) and 65 regional Corporate Business Centres. Santander UK is subject to the full supervision of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) in the UK. Santander UK plc customers are protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) in the UK.
