Strategy: Plotting a
course into the future
In the year under review, Rabobank Group, being
the local Rabobanks, Rabobank Nederland and its
subsidiaries, made significant progress on the
route towards achieving its strategic objectives.
Rabobank Group aims to be the largest, best and
most innovative all-finance service provider in the
Netherlands and the world's uncontested number
1 food agri business bank. In addition, the
Group wants to be a world leader in sustainable
entrepreneurship.
Leading all-finance service provider in the
Netherlands
Why market leadership?
14 Rabobank Group Annual Report 2004
Strategy
Rabobank Group's core objective is and remains the creation of maxi
mum customer value combined with healthy business development.
It aims to achieve that objective by offering services and products with
the best possible price/quality balance. Customer value is the combina
tion of acting in the clients' best interests, customer satisfaction with the
service provision and the extent to which clients endorse Rabobank's
brand values. Customer value is measured each year with the aid of the
customer value monitor (see page 21).
Near-you, committed and leading
The Rabobank brand stands for 'near-you', 'committed' and 'leading'.
Given its origins as a cooperative, Rabobank is firmly rooted in local
society. As the 'bank-near-you' of the Netherlands, Rabobank knows its
clients and market opportunities better than any other bank. Rabobank
is different from other financial institutions in the Netherlands in that
clients can become members of the organisation. This membership
offers a unique opportunity to enter into a long and meaningful
relationship with clients. Through their influence on the bank's policy,
members feel structurally involved in Rabobank's continuity and future
and can even help shape that future. The scope created in the articles
of association last year to install member councils at the local banks
has opened the way to embedding member control deeper in the
Rabobank organisation (see the chapter on Corporate Governance on
page 50). The success of the membership policy was reflected in a 7%
increase in membership in 2004, to almost 1.5 million.
Rabobank is a leading and innovative player and wishes to be recognised
as such by its clients. In order to achieve this, it aims for market leader
ship in all fields of financial services, including insurance.
Being market leader is not a goal in itself but a means of achieving
maximum customer value. Substantial market positions are necessary to:
be seen and experienced as the number 1 in financial services;
be able to recruit and retain people with the required expertise;
be able to operate efficiently and cost-effectively in the market;
be able to make the large investments required in product and process
innovation, given the increasing importance of innovative power.
In order to be regarded as the number 1 in financial services, Rabobank
wants to be the clients' first choice and best buy. This could mean local
Rabobanks selling third-party products besides their own. This is in line
with the trend of'open architecture', which aims at offering proprietary
as well as third-party products, so that the client can choose from the
broadest possible product range. For example, since September 2004
the local banks are offering not only Robeco investment funds but also
ABN AMRO, ING, Delta Lloyd, Fortis, Fidelity and Merrill Lynch investment
funds. Clients increasingly insist on independence from their financial
service provider. Precisely for that reason, the biggest challenge is to
provide own products that are superior to those of the competition.
Sustaining and reinforcing market leadership also requires constant
performance improvement. This will be achieved by a combination of
higher added value and lower costs, the net result of which should be
higher banking productivity. This is a necessary move in view of the
long-term squeeze of interest rate margins, growing competition from
new financial and non-financial players, increasing (price) transparency
of financial products as well as technological developments such as
Internet banking.
