1 d. Other initiatives for the customer
The initiatives listed below were designed to improve customer satisfaction.
Adjusting the rate structure for mortgages
Facilitating additional mortgage repayments
Introduction of a negative equity scheme for mortgages
Launch of Zo wil ik wonen ('Home Choices') online information platform for consumers
Launch of PeriodSavings
Appropriate solutions for interest rate swaps
Additional lending for SMEs
Assistance by Special Accounts
Australia: RaboDirect app
Online customer influence
International Business Day
'Banking for Food' knowledge exchange
Sanctions on trade to and from Russia: Working Capital for Agricultural Companies Guarantee
Support for farms/businesses affected by avian flu
Read more about these subjects here.
2. Innovation
Rabobank has always been a leader when it comes to innovating its services and it ended up
growing into one of the most innovative and progressive financial service providers around.
We were one of the first banks to introduce internet and mobile banking services and were the
driving force behind the rise and success of iDeal, currently the most widely used online
payment tool in the Netherlands. Rabobank's MyOrder application is an m-commerce platform
with great potential, while the bank demonstrates its social involvement through the WeHelpen
initiative and shows its customers how to make their business models more sustainable in the
Circular Economy Challenge. Yet the rate at which changes are occurring require a sharper focus
than may have been the case in the past.This has prompted us to give innovation a structured
place within the organisation and to make it part of our long-term strategy.
After sponsoring the start-up accelerator programme of the Startupbootcamp Amsterdam in
2013, Rabobank and DLL decided to enter into a three-year partnership with the
Startupbootcamp FinTech in London and its e-commerce and m-commerce counterpart in
Amsterdam. These partnerships enable Rabobank to get closer to the developments occurring
outside the bank and will give it greater access to successful start-ups in the financial services
sector. This partnership with Startupbootcamp has resulted in a number of alliances with
Facturis and MyOrder.
Rabobank has also reached out to form new partnerships with other large organisations in the
Netherlands. We teamed up with KLM, Ahold, TomTom, Philips, USG and Amsterdam Airport
Schiphol to host the Dutch Open Hackathon in September 2014, a 30-hour event that has
grown into one of the largest hackathons worldwide.
One specific change of which we will soon notice the effect is the implementation of laws
relating to the Payment Service Directive II (PSD II). The PSD II is scheduled to take effect in
2017. This change - to which Rabobank refers as the 'transition to Open Banking' - is so
fundamental that it served as the impetus for pinpointing a number of potential future
scenarios for financial services. In order to increase the bank's flexibility, we are developing a
number of'open APIs', with 'API' being an acronym for application programming interface.
Customer focus
