Improving commercial drive
corporatefinance
The bank is presently engineering an important strategie move away from the
more traditional, balance-sheet driven activities towards a more multi-layered
spectrum of products and services tailored to meet our clients' needs.
In this connection, corporate finance has unveiled two important initiatives.
Reintroducing CAMs
Gathering pace
Green light go-ahead
Global responsibilities
What sNewS Issue 6- June 1998 1
The first initiative is the appointment
of three global product managers
(GPMs) for M&A, structureel finance,
and structured trade finance, a move
designed to reinforce the growing and
global importance of these three spheres.
As of last month, Brian Havill came on-
board as the global head of our new
M&A product unit which operates under
the corporate finance management team
^i'd by Wouter Kolff. The aim is to
intensify and improve our capability in
M&A, which is expected not only to
deliver a positive result on its own, but
also to open the door for cross-selling
other kinds of profitable business derived
from it. This is a field in which our rich
knowledge base in specific markets and
products can be potentially leveraged to
achieve a maximum effect. It is therefore
of real strategie importance to our bank.
Similarly, Willem van 't Hooft has been
appointed GPM of structured finance,
and Shafik Gabr as GPM of trade and
structured trade finance. These units will
enjoy a similarly high strategie profile.
At the same time, the concept of the
icoordinating account manager (CAM) is
Jieing reinvigorated. This is an idea
which has been explored in the past -
with mixed results - but now is coming
into its own. The basic idea is that one
officer should serve as a single point of
contact for developing, co-ordinating and
implementing our marketing and credit
strategy; that is to say, for the delivery of
customer value to all of the international
subsidiaries, affiliates and branches of
our major international clients.
First mooted as long ago as 1986, it was
recognized and partially adopted on the
basis of its clear intrinsic merits. It was
also revived in 1993, although in both
cases it was clear that it was an idea
ahead of its time. Specifically, we were
»acking an adequate capacity to monitor
mr global exposure; we had no
management information system; we had
inadequate means of measuring
performance outside of the context of
the local budget. Little surprise that,
lacking the active support of branch and
senior managers, the idea failed to gather
pace and support. The problem, in short,
was that we had failed to make the
transition to the one balance sheet/one
P&L mentality - a transition that has
now gathered pace.
Today, of course, the circumstances
under which we work have changed
overall. Not only does the CAM idea
retain its intrinsic appeal - that of
important question included: whom shall
we designate as key CAM clients? As a
starting point, it has been decided to
limit the number of such clients to a
manageable 25, and then to gradually
increase this number to 50 in the next
year and a half. Key clients will include
Ahold, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill,
CITIC, Continental Grain, Hutchison
Whampoa, Heineken and Unilever.
The managing board will ratify and
monitor CAM relationship development
plans and relationship progress. Global
business managers will consult with local
Implementing the concept of coordinating
account managers (from left to right), Peter
Greenberg, Wouter Kolffand Arnold Kuijpers
providing global focus and co-ordination
to key RI clients - but our forward-
looking push into an overlapping matrix
of responsibilities and accountabilities,
plus the ongoing IT/MIS upgrades, have
together established the necessary pre-
conditions under which the CAM
approach can be implemented in a truly
sustainable way. This, at least, is the
view of the managing board, which last
month gave the green light for the
implementation of CAM to proceed. The
first and foremost task is to structure our
implementation in a way that reflects the
lessons gained from past experience. One
general managers on the formulation of
these plans, and if a specific product is
expected to generate more than a
certain percentage of the income derived
from a given cliënt, then the global
product manager will be expected to
countersign as well. Over time, there will
be senior bankers in all regions, and they
will act as full-time proxies for the
members of the executive and managing
boards who are the CAM account
executives. As part of the effort to
introducé a fully accountable system as
a component of the overall 1999
business planning cycle, it is expected
that relationship development plans for
the initial 25 CAM clients will be
submitted to the managing board by
August 30 of this year.
