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Suppliers

Supplier management at Santander

Our commitment to our suppliers
At Santander, we collaborate with over 1,300 suppliers and intra-group companies who support us in running our business effectively. Together, we work towards achieving our purpose to help people and businesses prosper in a simple, personal, and fair way.

We apply these same values to our engagement with our supplier population and therefore we actively support the following:

  • Internally, we require all staff involved with engaging and negotiating with suppliers to follow to our Code of Supplier Responsibility (PDF - 923 KB). We also expect all of our existing and prospective suppliers to follow this code. 
  • We support the Prompt Payment Code, committing us to paying suppliers on time, continuing to be transparent about our payment procedures and encourage the same best practice to our suppliers and their supply chain.
  • We have signed the Business in the Community’s Access Pledge, committing us to ensuring small to medium enterprises (SMEs) can compete for our business on a level playing field.
  • We are also a signatory to the Fintech Pledge, a HM Treasury and Tech Nation sponsored commitment demonstrating we are here to support FinTech’s in finding partners to launch and scale their solutions.

Our digital transformation
At Santander we value our relationships with our suppliers. We are embarking on an ambitious Procurement Transformation to make it easier to do business with Santander by streamlining and simplifying how we work together. Our goal is to continually improve operational efficiency and enable timely payments that benefits both you (the supplier) and Santander. 

Introducing our supplier management team 

  • Service manager - there is a Santander individual responsible for every service we contract, these will be the people you deal with for day-to-day queries
     
  • Supplier Collaboration Partner - there is an individual responsible for our key third party relationships in the bank, managing the performance of the third party holistically and drive commerciality and innovation
     
  • Aquanima - the Aquanima team are part of the Santander group, they will reach out to you for market intelligence, to invite you to participate in tender activity for the bank locally, regionally and globally, and to gain information from you to make sure we can onboard and qualify you as appropriate to do business with and pay
     
  • Accounts Payable - these people make sure you get paid on time, and let you know if the invoice you have submitted doesn’t have enough information on it to allow payment to happen, sometimes the company Gesban will appear in their signature
     
  • Bottomline - this is the company we use to do electronic scanning of your invoices, they can accept XBRL, PDF, Word, and physical invoices - the more digitalised your invoices are the quicker they get processed, ask your Service Manage and Supplier collaboration partner if you want to advance the format and we will help

Understanding our digital roadmap

SAP Ariba – we use SAP Ariba to manage our sourcing and procurement processes and to collaborate with our suppliers. For you to be registered as a supplier with Santander, we will send you an invitation to register for a free SAP Ariba account. This is where we ask you to provide information about your company so we can make sure we know who you are and to ensure we pay the right people. For help with SAP Ariba, please contact certification.uk@aquanima.com

Hellios – Hellios manages Third Party Risk Management and Compliance for the Financial Services Sector. As part of our overall supplier due diligence, we ask our suppliers to register with Hellios and answer profiling and compliance questions. For help using Hellios for Santander, please contact certification.uk@aquanima.com

Coupa - As a regulated bank, ensuring that we safeguard our interactions with our suppliers is vital. Before we enter a business relationship with third parties, we must risk assess the service that will be provided on behalf of Santander. To help us manage our service-based risk, we use Coupa and you may be asked to provide information about how you specifically support a service, in addition to the company wide info given via Helios. If we require you to provide this information, you will get an email from Santander UK RFB Group: SantanderUK@eumail.hiperos.com asking you to log into Coupa to answer the specific service-based risk questions. 

Globality – For some sourcing activity we have launched a new online procurement system called Globality and you may get a notification to provide information from them rather than from a Santander or Aquanima person. This is part of our sourcing process to help us contact potential suppliers who have experience in the service we require. 

EcoVadis – Supplier sustainability is critical in our journey to become a more responsible bank. We are striving to improve the sustainability of our supply base and will begin to utilise EcoVadis to help us do this. EcoVadis ratings cover a broad range of sustainability performance across Environmental, Labour and Human Rights, Ethics and Sustainable Procurement. We will be in touch about how we work together to gather sustainability insights. More information on EcoVadis can be found here: https://ecovadis.com  

Vizibl – For some of our key relationships we will ask for you to report performance in this tool, offer innovation and insight into how we can improve together, track meetings and mutually agreed actions. More information on Vizibl can be found here: https://www.vizibl.co

Our ask of you

  • Supplier qualification - we appreciate that we ask you for a variety of information through various portals and some of you have been suppliers for a period of time, However, we operate in a regulated environment and this means we have to respond to new requests from the regulator at a great frequency; and this means we have to ask for more information from you to help this. Please respond to additional requests as promptly as you can, and if you don’t understand the request let us know. We genuinely only ask for information that we need to meet our obligations, and sometimes delayed provision can impact our ability to pay.
     
  • Code of Conduct - we want to operate with likeminded businesses that have a positive and responsible impact on the environment we work in; and take the chance to look at our Code of Supplier Responsibility  (PDF - 923 KB) and confirm that we are aligned.
     
  • Grow together - we want to develop long lasting value driven relationships, to enable this we might ask for you to report your performance through Vizibl, and to suggest innovation through the same tool. However regardless of how we manage you we want to understand your performance, how we can improve together, discuss any additional value you can bring to Santander and will want you to engage with us about this.

We're going to be in touch soon on:–

  • Our Coupa risk management system has been enhanced to incorporate an updated risk framework to align to new regulatory requirements, and we need to ensure our existing services are assessed to the revised framework.  Where the service you provide to Santander is in-scope, you will get an email from us asking you to log into Coupa and complete questionnaires to confirm your control environment in respect of the service that you provide. Please act promptly to this request and complete the questionnaires, as this ensures that we meet our regulatory requirements. If you have any questions about Coupa or the specific risk assessment please contact certification.uk@aquanima.com
     
  • Vizibl and EcoVadis will be going live with selected suppliers on a phased basis, we will write to you and invite you to join soon. Please contact us at procurementtransformation@santander.co.uk if you have any questions
     
  • The Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA) have introduced some new requirements on operational continuity in resolution (OCIR) and supplier management (SS2/21), alongside new data transfer requirements as part of an EU law judgement (SCHREMS). We're doing our best to combine any changes to contracts this may mean for you, and will be in contact shortly with any impacts

Our Terms and Conditions
Copies of our current general Terms and Conditions can be accessed below. These may differ if we have already contracted with you directly. Any Terms and Conditions that have been agreed with individual suppliers will take precedence.

Supplier payments
Purchase Orders will usually be emailed to you by the email address we have agreed with you. For queries relating to invoices you have already sent us, please email us using the following:

General enquiries
For all other general enquiries, please email supplier.uk@aquanima.com.