Team building
IT - GLOBAL CENTRE OF
COMPETENCE
10
luxembourg
WHAT'S News Issue 1 January 1997
Colleagues in Singapore and
other tight labour markets will
recognize Luxembourg's main
problem in its push for
Daniël Hubinon
expansion. I suppose everyone
will have mentioned just how
small Luxembourg is,' smiles
human resources manager
Daniël Hubinon. 'So we're not
looking at a huge labour pool
here. Fortunately, the concept
of foreign employees is very
much entrenched in the culture
here. We're so close to our
neighbouring countries that
cross-border staff, many of
whom actually live in France,
Germany or Belgium and
commute in, is very much the
norm. But we also have very
specific requirements in
recruiting staff. Apart from
obvious banking and other
specialist skills, the nature of
our business means language
skills are crucial. Some of our
people here speak three or four
languages and we try to
stimulate acquiring additional
ones wherever we can.'
Internal training in financial
services is another area of focus
in Luxembourg, but besides
training and developing
retention strategies for existing
personnel, the branch is very
clearly looking for experienced
people in its efforts to build
teams. 'We've grown extremely
rapidly over the past couple of
years,' Hubinon says, 'at the
beginning of 1995 there were
45 people here. Now we're
over 80 and still recruiting.
Although we enjoy an
extremely good reputation in
the market here, it's not easy to
find the high quality personnel
we want in that kind of
numbers.' However, he remains
optimistic. 'One of the
advantages in recruiting now is
that we have an increasingly
extensive international
network. That can certainly be
a plus when you're
interviewing potential
candidates.'
The members of the international private banking IT team
based in Luxembourg is already a familiar sight at IPB
centres around the world. Headed up by Alvaro Puebla
Gonzalez, the 11-strong group has built up - and is still
building - a level of excellence specifically in the IPB
Olympic system and its applications.
In the few years since its
inception, the IPB IT team has
acquired an indispensible role
in the development of private
banking as a spearhead in the
bank's international growth. In
the past couple of years, IPB
teams around the world have
grown rapidly, creating a basic
requirement for expertise in
tailoring the widely-used
Olympic system to specific
cliënt needs. 'Business has
certainly taken off,' confirms
Puebla Gonzalez. 'That has
meant we focused increasingly
not only on getting the systems
up and online for the various
IPB centres around the world,
but also on developing tailored
applications for our clients.'
By 'clients' Puebla Gonzalez
means Luxembourg, Cura^ao,
Zurich and Singapore.
'Olympic is basically a good
system for private bankers. It
can meet basic requirements,
but each office has different
needs. We don't change
anything on the data base itself.
What we do is design different
modules for each individual
system. If you look at retail,
then procedures are fairly
straightforward. But the private
banking package has to handle
a whole range of fairly complex
movements, such as securities,
portfolio management. We also
send people out to the branches
to work with the staff there.
Jesse Brewster was in Singapore
recently to get their system up.
But we've also had people
come here to explore how
Olympic can work for them.'
The team is convinced this
centre of competence approach
is effective for the whole IPB
network. 'You can't have the
level of expertise we're building
here in each branch,' says
Puebla Gonzalez, 'it wouldn't
make sense. We are working
continually on enhancing the
system applications, many of
which can be applied by more
than one and sometimes all
branches, and on the wish lists
of our clients, it wouldn't be
viable to have people all over
the world doubling up on that
work. And if there is a
problem, we're here for the
network.'
IPB IT may be located in
Luxembourg, but it is actually
a separate entity managed by a
steering committee consisting
of Thomas van Rijckevorsel in
Utrecht, Heinz Zimmer from
Zurich, Chris Hayes of
Singapore and Jean-Pierre Van
Keymeulen. Through regular
meeting with the team,
strategies and priorities are
determined and developed. In
fact, the centres of excellence
to be established in reponse to
the cliënt focus strategy need
look no further than
Luxembourg for a model that
is effective, efficiënt and
expert.
The IPB IT team: sitting (l.t.r.): Christophe Daxhelet and Marie
Mannis. Standing (l.t.r.): Raymond Penneman, Jesse Brewster, Alvaro
Puebla Gonzalez, Réginald Baillieux and Michel Ha.
GLOBAL IT CENTRE IPB
De IT afdeling van Luxemburg heeft zich ontwikkelt tot Global IT centre voor alle internationale Private Banking activiteiten. Deze
rol is niet in de laatste plaats te danken aan Alvaro Puebla Gonzalez, hoofd van de afdeling. Leden van het 11 man sterke team
wordén regelmatig gesignaleerd op andere kantoren om daar de nodige ondersteuning te bieden. Het IPB Olympic systeem wordt, indien nodig,
voor andere kantoren ook aangepast aan de specifieke wensen. Een ander project dat zijn voltooiing nadert is het cliënt relatiebeheer systeem.
Een door Luxemburg ontwikkeld flexibel systeem, waarin een grote hoeveelheid klantinformatie efficiënt kan worden opgeslagen.
