BOSTON, October 1 /PRNewswire/ --

- New flexible system to provide leading Spanish banking group with
faster payment services and increased efficiency of process development and
business operations.

Today at Sibos 2007, Microsoft Corp announced that Grupo Santander, the
world's 10th-largest financial group by market value, has chosen to use
Microsoft(R) technology as part of its strategic payments infrastructure. The
solution, due to go live during the next year, will see the consolidation of
the Group's individual banks' payments systems from multiple mainframes into
one homogeneous IT infrastructure.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000822/MSFTLOGO )

The consolidated payments system will utilise Microsoft BizTalk(R) Server
2006 as part of its core, as well as Microsoft SQL Server(TM), Microsoft
BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT, and web services, to enable faster payment
process times, reduce operating costs and bring significant cost efficiencies
to the entire Grupo Santander. The initial phase of the project will see the
Group's larger banks -- Banco Santander SA, Abbey National plc and Banesto SA
-- implementing the technology first, followed by the smaller banks and
building societies in the Group. The Microsoft-based core payments system
will enable connectivity and transactions processing for Single European
Payments Area (SEPA), connecting to the Euro Banking Association (EBA) and UK
Faster Payments.

Grupo Santander is currently developing different projects that will
culminate in a common payment infrastructure for the whole Group. These
include STP Manager, a system designed to handle all financial message
interchanges between the Group and external institutions; Faster Payments, a
key initiative that will significantly increase the speed of credit transfer
from one account to another, enabling internet and telephone banking users to
benefit from near-real-time payment processing; and SMS Text Messages
Banking, which will offer new services to mobile users, increasing customer
loyalty and the bank's revenue.

In addition to a core infrastructure for domestic and non-domestic
payments services, it is anticipated that the project will also bring the
Group further benefits, including the ability to receive payments information
in a variety of formats by consolidating interfaces with the various
Automated Clearing Houses (ACH) and corporates it is connected to. The
system's flexibility will enable the payments engine to be modified and
routing rules to be altered as required. Also, having one global payment
infrastructure will allow the Group to move payments processing from batch to
online.

"Having explored and evaluated various solutions, we chose Microsoft
technology after the Group's architecture team ran a proof of concept at the
company's headquarters in Redmond that proved the system would be able to
handle 62 million messages per day, with processing rates of 1,156 messages
per second," said Maite Agujetas, chief architect of Grupo Santander. "The
speed of the system and the potential cost savings that could be achieved
across the Group as a result helped us come to our decision. In addition, we
believe that this project will help us easily adapt our current systems with
minimal disruption to our customers."

"Enterprise payments is a complex and rapidly evolving area. Regulation,
compliance, security and technology are all matters affecting the global
payments business," said Sheida Hadji-Ashrafi, worldwide industry manager
payments at Microsoft. "Grupo Santander has been looking for a more flexible,
open architecture to respond faster to those requirements driven by new EU
financial regulations. Microsoft is very pleased to be the platform of choice
of Grupo Santander, providing an integrated and flexible infrastructure that
will be capable of adapting to the changing market demands as well as
reducing costs and inefficiencies from existing systems."

About Microsoft in Financial Services

Microsoft's Financial Services group helps financial firms leverage
technology to amplify the impact their people can deliver to drive business
success. We help our customers in banking, capital markets/securities, and
insurance achieve four business outcomes: develop relationships, drive
innovation, improve operations and build connections. To do this, we focus
our products and technologies, and our work with leading solutions, services
and hardware partners, on key areas where we believe we and our partners can
deliver exceptional value; those areas include advisor platforms, channel
renewal, core banking, insurance value chain, investment management, risk
management and compliance, and payments. More information can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/financialservices.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in
software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realise
their full potential.

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              http://www.microsoft.com/financialservices