Santander transforms legal operations with Pega GenAI

The Business Issue

Let’s be honest: Legal operations aren’t exactly known for speed. Or simplicity. Or joy.

They’re often the last place anyone expects to find innovation – let alone transformation. But that’s exactly what Santander pulled off.

This is the story of how one of the world’s largest banks turned a high-stakes, high-friction legal process into a fully automated, AI-powered engine of efficiency. And how they did it not with armies of consultants or years of planning – but with a bold vision, a unified platform, and a little help from GenAI.

The problem: A legal bottleneck that couldn’t scale
Santander’s legal team in Brazil was drowning in complexity. Every month, they processed over 1,000 legal cases – each packed with up to 200 pages of dense, unstructured documents. Think handwritten notes, scanned PDFs, and legalese that would make your eyes water.

The process was long, manual, and expensive. It involved:

• Sorting and screening incoming documents from email, APIs, and physical mail
• Determining whether the bank was a party in the case
• Registering cases in legacy systems
• Preparing evidence and legal responses
• Manually signing and submitting final responses to judges

Every step required human intervention. Every delay risked missing crucial deadlines. And every inefficiency added cost and compliance risk.

The team knew they couldn’t keep scaling this way. They needed a smarter, faster, more resilient approach – one that didn’t just digitize the old process but reimagined it entirely.

The Solution

Santander used the Pega Platform to manage the entire legal workflow – connecting legacy systems, automating handoffs, and embedding AI into every step. But the real game-changer? GenAI.

With Pega GenAI, Santander trained a legal-specific model to read and understand unstructured legal documents – the kind that traditional OCR tools couldn’t touch. They fine-tuned prompts, built reusable connectors, and used Pega’s workflow intelligence to monitor accuracy in real time.

The Results

The results were staggering:

• Accuracy jumped from 75% to over 98.7%
• Over 200,000 cases were automated
• More than 2 million pages of legal documents were interpreted by AI
• SLA compliance soared to 99.5%

And this wasn’t just automation for automation’s sake. It was transformation with teeth, reducing risk, accelerating outcomes, and proving that even the most complex processes can be reimagined.

What made it work
Let’s break it down:

• Unified platform: Pega brought everything together – case management, AI, RPA, and legacy integration – in one intelligent architecture. No stitching. No silos. Just one system that actually talks to itself.
• Real-time monitoring: With Pega’s built-in analytics, the team could track every case, flag anomalies, and make sure nothing slipped through the cracks. Compliance wasn’t an afterthought – it was baked in.
• Human + machine: This wasn’t about replacing people. It was about giving them superpowers. Lawyers still reviewed final responses — but only after the AI did the heavy lifting. The result? Faster decisions, better outcomes, and happier teams.

And they’re not stopping there. The same model is now being applied to other complex workflows — from identity verification to loan processing. Anywhere there’s friction, there’s opportunity.

It’s about what happens when you stop trying to automate yesterday’s processes and start designing for what’s next.

Ready to dive deeper into Santander’s journey? Watch their PegaWorld session.