Santander UK recruits digital banking expert from Barclays
(7 December 2017 – United Kingdom) Spanish banking giant Santander has recruited a digital banking expert from rival Barclays as it looks to meet the needs of its customers.
Michael Harte will become chief operating officer at Santander’s UK operation in 2018.
Harte is a pioneer of digital banking. In 2012, he headed up a project, as CIO, to put Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s online banking service into the Amazon Web Services cloud. This move to a public cloud was, at the time, a major world first.
He joined Barclays as head of IT in 2014, and later became head of innovation at the bank.
Nathan Bostock, CEO, Santander, said, “He brings extensive knowledge and experience of both the banking and wider financial services sector, specifically the transformation and disruption occurring across products and business models.
“Michael will be pivotal in delivering our ambitious innovation agenda and our digital transformation, creating a more agile organisation that is responsive to our customer needs and market-leading innovation.”
Competition to traditional banks will increase when the latest EU Payment Services Directive (PSD2) becomes law.
PSD2 will enable third parties to access the customer data held by banks via application programming interfaces (APIs), if given permission, and offer services using this information. Payments could be initiated by third-party suppliers and account information viewed via them, or both. This would mean a third party could build services on top of an account and allow the consumer to use these rather than those offered by the bank.
Subscribe