Santander Italy has partnered with Namirial since 2016, progressively digitalizing its core banking processes – from digital signatures and document archiving to e-invoicing, strong customer authentication, and remote onboarding. Today, more than 95% of all contracts are signed digitally. What began as a front-end rebuild has become a decade-long transformation journey.
95%+
of contracts signed digitally today
2016
year the Santander Italy–Namirial partnership began
10
years of continuous digital transformation together
Introduction
Santander Italy is the Italian consumer finance subsidiary of Banco Santander, one of the world’s largest financial groups. Founded in 2003 when Banco Santander acquired FinConsumo, the company is headquartered in Turin and operates in the consumer lending market, offering auto loans, durable goods financing, personal loans, and deposit accounts. Over the past decade, Santander Italy has grown significantly – both organically and through joint ventures with partners such as TIM (one of Italy’s main telecommunications companies) and Hyundai Capital. This growth has gone hand in hand with a fundamental transformation of its digital capabilities, with Namirial as a core technology partner throughout.
Challenges and drivers for digital trust services in consumer finance
Santander Italy’s digital transformation was not triggered by a single event – it was driven by a succession of strategic, operational, and regulatory pressures that accumulated over nearly a decade.
The starting point was a strategic leadership change in 2016, which created a moment to challenge assumptions across the business. The processes underpinning the lending operation – particularly in auto and durable goods financing – needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. Paper-based contracts, manual document handling, and fragmented front-end and back-end systems were holding the company back.
In 2017, digital archiving became the next priority. Santander Italy performs securitization – selling portfolios of contracts to third parties – five or six times per year. Under a paper-based system, that meant paying an outsourcer to physically retrieve contracts from storage, box by box. Digital archiving eliminated that dependency entirely, making the process faster, cheaper, and fully under the bank’s own control.
In 2019, electronic invoicing became a mandatory requirement in Italy. Rather than treating compliance as a ceiling, Santander Italy used it as a floor – deploying e-invoicing in a way that genuinely improved the internal accounting department’s ability to generate, send, and receive invoices digitally.
In 2020, PSD2 brought strong customer authentication obligations. Again, Santander Italy chose to go beyond minimum compliance, using the opportunity to give customers more secure access to their personal data.
2020 brought the COVID-19 pandemic, which compressed years of digital adoption pressure into months. Remote onboarding – with self-video identification, biometric verification, and self-onboarding flows – moved from roadmap item to operational necessity. Certified digital communication, replacing paper correspondence, followed shortly after.
Why did Santander Italy need a Qualified Trust Services Provider?
Consumer finance contracts carry real legal and financial weight. In a market where contracts are originated through multiple channels – in-store, remote, telesales – and must withstand regulatory scrutiny and potential litigation, the legal validity of every signature is non-negotiable.
When Santander Italy first introduced digital signatures, it offered customers graphometric and OTP-based options. As confidence grew, the bank moved further: activating advanced and qualified signature options in close collaboration with Namirial. The distinction matters. With an advanced signature, the bank retains responsibility for demonstrating validity in case of dispute. With a qualified signature – backed by a qualified certificate from a QTSP – that responsibility shifts to the certification authority. Choosing the right signature type for the right channel, product, and risk profile became a deliberate part of the bank’s process design.
For a regulated financial institution managing risk across multiple channels and customer segments, this kind of granular, compliant approach to digital trust is only possible with a fully accredited QTSP as the underlying infrastructure provider.
Why Namirial?
Santander Italy and Namirial began their partnership in 2016, at the moment the bank was rebuilding its digital processes from scratch. Over the following ten years, Namirial accompanied Santander Italy through every major step of its digital evolution: digital signature, digital archive, e-invoicing, strong customer authentication, remote onboarding, biometric verification, and certified communications. Every capability put in place is still running. Every KPI moved in the right direction – digital capability, customer satisfaction, and processing speed all improved measurably.
What sets the partnership apart is not just the breadth of solutions deployed, but the nature of the relationship itself. Namirial has consistently acted as an advisor – helping Santander Italy anticipate trends and prepare for what was coming next. Santander Italy in turn has provided direct feedback that has shaped product development on Namirial’s side. The result is a genuinely collaborative model in which both parties have grown together. After a decade, more than 95% of Santander Italy’s contracts are signed digitally – and the journey is far from over.