The challenge

By 2018, Santander’s IT organisation was running a high volume of concurrent demands — application development, IT operations, infrastructure, and PMO-level project oversight, all happening in parallel. 

The existing tooling (JIRA for execution-level Agile work, Scrum as the team methodology) handled team-level visibility well. What was missing was a layer above that: an at-a-glance view of all the IT demand flowing through the organisation, so leaders could see where work was stuck, where capacity was constrained, and where the system was working.

The functions involved were broad:

• Product / Software Engineering
• IT — Application Development
• IT — Operations / Infrastructure
• PMO / Project Management

Each function needed its own board-level view. Leadership needed an aggregated view across them. JIRA alone didn’t deliver that.

The solution

Santander evaluated multiple Kanban platforms and chose SwiftKanban over LeanKit. Three things drove the decision:

1. Intuitive UI that didn’t require heavy training to roll out across non-engineering teams (IT Ops, PMO)
2. Good functionality coverage for both team-level and portfolio-level Kanban — including the visibility layer that sat above JIRA
3. Clean design that worked alongside their existing JIRA + Scrum stack rather than replacing it

SwiftKanban was deployed in 2018 as the visibility-and-flow layer across the four IT functions, with Scrum continuing at the team level and JIRA continuing as the engineering execution tool.

The outcome

The single biggest change wasn’t a metric — it was a capability. Santander gained:

• Better overview of the IT demand portfolio across all four functions, in one view
• Visibility of tasks at a level of granularity that JIRA alone couldn’t expose
• A clean separation of execution (JIRA) and flow visibility (SwiftKanban) — letting engineering teams keep their workflow while giving leadership the portfolio view

Why this matters for banking IT organisations

Banking IT is structurally complex — multiple functions, parallel demands, regulatory constraints, and tight SLAs. Most engineering teams already have execution tooling (JIRA, Azure DevOps). 

What’s usually missing is the layer that turns parallel execution streams into a portfolio view. Santander’s SwiftKanban deployment is a clean example of that layer working alongside, not replacing, the underlying execution stack.

Download the case study to understand how Santander chose SwiftKanban over LeanKit to bring visibility, structure, and overview to its IT demand portfolio.