We had to reinvent our total chain
of services to meet the expectations
of more and different customers}
Armand van Wolferen:
'Two years ago, cash management was a service for
selected wholesale clients at Rl. Now half of my team is
supporting member bank clients as well." The member
banks customers are using the service in a different way
from the large wholesale customers and their behaviour
in terms of transactions and expectations differs from
the large wholesale customers' as well. The re-invention
and re-engineering of the total chain of support from
scratch was only possible in a close cooperation with
all ITOPS departments, the business (FL) and Rabobank
Netherlands. It was this insight that made the taskforce
approach successful.
The development of Rabo Cash Management (RCM)
for corporate clients affected all three departments,
Mijnen explains. "When we selected software for RCM,
we developed a service for some 700 large customers,
predominantly multinationals with a strong presence
in the Netherlands. Currently, we are
servicing around 20,000 users with the
same system. This shift created a lot
of challenges. The original software
and infrastructure were simply not
designed to handle all these different
kinds of users. They all want proper
functionalities and thosefunctionalities
have to be better than those of our
competitors. That put a lot of pressure
on our developers." The stellar growth
of the user base put the stability of
the whole system at risk unless we
took appropriate measures, adds Eelco
Kaan. "Managing that growth was an
issue. Not only did we get more users
than expected, but they also started to
use RCM more often than anticipated,
stretching the system to its limits. We
had a continuity challenge on our
hands. Adding extra functionality for
new users was an additional puzzle, and
while we were trying to address these Armand Van Wolferen
issues, the regulatory environment was
changing because of SEPA [Single Euro Payments Area,
edQuite an interesting mix for our teams, so we had
to work together and coordinate our efforts in ITOPS
together with Rabobank Netherlands and the member
banks. We just had to solve this together."
So has the puzzle finally been pieced together? "For the
customers, the problems with stability and continuity
have been solved," says Van Wolferen. "We still have
some challenges with adding additional functionality
and are working hard to make sure we comply with new
regulations, but we are in much better shape now. When
we started working on this in May 2009, we had a lot of
incidents and our customer satisfaction ratings dropped.
My team spent many hours over a very hot summer
trying to resolve the issues, so I was handing out lots of
free ice creams to keep them going! The ratings started to
move in a positive direction again when we introduced
new services, together with an increase in performance
and stability."
ISSUE 27 MAY
RI WORLD
