BANKING SPECIAL
Eelco Kaan
At the same time, the Operations and FL teams were
busy improving the quality of the cliënt onboarding
and cliënt support. Dedicated implementation teams
were established to help assess the cliënt needs and
coordinate cliënt implementation and hand over to
support. Van Wolferen: "All these actions resulted in
improved cliënt satisfaction from fïve and six to a level
of more than seven within one year, which is rather
exceptional. Nowadays, we are also performing load and
stress tests on both the software and the infrastructure to
be able to predict how many customers and transactions
we can support from an IT point of view. Together with
the load COS can handle from a customer service point
of view, we are able to offer reliable predictions of how
many new customers we can onboard. Before we started
the taskforce, the proof of the pudding was sometimes in
the eating."
Now that Rabo Cash Management has been adapted
for small and medium enterprises in the Netherlands,
can corporate customers abroad use the same system?
'There are a few customers that use this system in other
countries," says Van Wolferen. "Flowever, our first priority
is to continue the rollout in the Dutch market. Some of
our banks abroad use domestic solutions, and in the
future we want to interconnect those, but there are no
specific plans in place at the moment."
a strategy towards more global coordination
and governance," says Kaan. 'The GFM side
of the bank has been a global operation for
years, but in corporate banking we have just
scratched the surface. There is a long way
to go before we will have all our systems
in line, but it is also important to take care
of local specifics. We want to stay close to
our local clients, so we need to keep an
eye on local differences - and regulatory
differences, of course. But moving towards
global governance helps us align all local activities and
improve our unified interface with customers. It is a
balancing act, especially because local differences also
offer an opportunity to learn from each other and have
a continuing dialogue about improvement."
Van Wolferen gives an example of local differences. "In
Hong Kong, our web portals are different from those
in Europe, simply because Chinese clients prefer flashy
information. Our websites in that region are developed
with more 'bling' built in. In western cultures, banking
portals are more understated. Those differences have to
be taken into account. Sometimes one region is ahead
of another, simply because, for instance, mobile banking
has evolved more in that specific part of the world. We
can all learn from that experience. Quite frankly, I am
looking forward to getting the opportunity as new global
head of Corporate Banking IT to organise, for example,
workshops between our IT staff in the Netherlands and
our colleagues in California, as I am sure there is a mutual
interest in exchanging ideas and experiences/'a
Rabobank Group is not a typical one-size-fits-all organi-
sation. So how does ITOPS deal with the dilemmas
between central and local initiatives? 'There is, of course,
MAY 201
RI WORLD