How Santander Leasing Rebuilt Its Onboarding from the Inside Out with spektr

The Challenge

Behind every new client sits a web of internal processes, often distributed across different systems, teams, and workflows. For the Santander Leasing team, expanding into new customer segments meant navigating a fragmented infrastructure with layers of manual interventions and tacit institutional knowledge.

Workflows lived in different environments, dependent on employees with deep internal expertise. Stitching everything together required time, tribal knowledge, and hands-on effort. The result? A process that was difficult to scale, very complex to hand off, and prone to breaking at key transition points – slowing down client onboarding and leading to inconsistent experiences.

The Vision

The Santander Leasing team knew they needed to move fast, but not at the cost of compliance or operational risk. The goal was to replace manual onboarding and credit evaluation steps with a seamless, automated system that could handle complexity without compromise (while also making the experience smoother for end clients).

Rather than overlaying new tools on top of manual workflows, they partnered with spektr to co-create a system from the inside out – one that deeply integrated into their proprietary infrastructure and connected all the dots behind the scenes.

“We weren’t looking for a plug-and-play vendor,” says André Guardado, Head of Legal and Compliance at Santander Leasing. “We needed a partner who could adapt to our systems, understand our logic, and make the process faster and smarter.”

The Build

Santander Leasing kicked off their partnership with spektr with one geographic unit, focusing on building an end-to-end customer lifecycle due diligence setup aligned with AML requirements. Working through intensive testing and iterative feedback, the teams translated complex requirements into a single, stable onboarding flow.

spektr is now deeply connected to Santander Leasing’s internal systems, ensuring data is flowing end-to-end, across environments, with no manual handoffs or information gaps. What was once a fragmented process full of manual stitching has become a fully integrated experience with no broken links.

Each layer of the process (from data collection to credit assessment to final approval) has now been reengineered into an automated flow, tailored to Santander Leasing’s logic and compliant from day one. For clients, this means a faster, more intuitive experience; no more chasing forms or waiting on back-office coordination.

The Advantage

The partnership proves that even in the most complex regulatory environments, compliance and onboarding can become enablers of speed, not blockers of progress. With one streamlined digital flow, Santander Leasing’s clients now go through onboarding and credit checks more efficiently, with fewer forms and less back-and-forth.

“spektr turned our most complex processes into a flow anyone can follow - bringing structure and scalability to something that used to rely heavily on internal know-how,” André concludes.