This post is cowritten by Julio Bando from Santander.
Santander faced a significant technical challenge in managing an infrastructure that processes billions of daily transactions across more than 200 critical systems. The expansion into diverse financial services, including investment banking, wealth management, insurance, and payment solutions, had created unprecedented technological complexity, requiring a robust, agile, and scalable infrastructure solution. This raised two main issues. Santander needed to ensure that provisioned services followed established architecture definitions, and they needed to reduce infrastructure provisioning time, which took up to 90 days. This situation demanded intensive operational effort. The solution emerged through an innovative platform engineering initiative called Catalyst, which transformed the bank’s cloud infrastructure and development management. This post analyzes the main cases, benefits, and results obtained with…