GLOBAL CONFERENCE
Feeling cliënt pull
What'sinitforme?
Cooperative by nature
(Left to right) Sam Moonen, Maud Smeets, Yvette Janssens - content development and event coordination
Furthermore, in addition to the Bank's core clients, GFM
needs to have relarionships with other clients, those regarded
as core for GFM, in order to facilitate the Bank's core clients.'
Balancing product push and cliënt focus is a challenge all banks
face. Genuine cliënt orientation will give Rabobank an
outstanding opportunity to improve its market position.
'Traditionally, vve've been working with a product push atti
tude, now we need to balance this with a cliënt pull approach,'
adds Sam Moonen, Business Manager for GFM, who organized
the events with Maud Smeets and Yvette Janssens. A unique
aspect of both events was cliënt interaction, which although
confronting, underlined the need for deeper cliënt contact to
ensure more attractive products. 'Our product-client grids must
be refined. lt's up to cliënt people to feed product people this
information. It's also up to product people to educate Relation-
ship Managers about products so they can flag us when they
see an opportunity for our products,' says Moonen. Clearly,
this calls for better teamwork between GFM and Relationship
Managers to gain a bigger share of corporate clients' wallets.
lt also raises the need to educate people outside GFM about
our products and markets. These people include those in credit
and legal, who make crucial decisions about GFM's deals.
'While the case for teamwork is easily argued, it's fairly
difficult to convince people of the need for strategie realign-
ment,' admits Schellens, 'because our bottom line is so healthy.
To achieve the long-term goals of the bank, cultural change is
necessary. We will be evolving our Human Resource policy to
meet this need. We will reward people bascd on qualitative and
not only quantitative assessment - and they will be rewarded
for reaching strategically aligned targets. Entrepreneurialship
and crcativity will remain important GFM cultural traits but
we will also strongiy encourage accountability, communica-
tion, transparency and teamwork.'
The ideal culture is where decision-making processes and
strategy building is transparent. 'We want our people to have
the opportunity to build and change this organization,' says
Schellens. 'We have a lot of expertise in many locations. We
need to optimize this expertise. The most important message is
we must share information, learn from each other and co-
operate better - after all, as Rik van Slingelandt recently said,
'We are working for a cooperative bank and we should take
that seriously.' H
The Word I '5
