ABN AMRO: Building a culture of transformation with cloud technology

Partnership

ABN AMRO has a strong, customer-centric vision: to be a personal bank in the digital age, and to provide “banking for better” for generations to come. Achieving that vision means digitizing its operations and moving to a cloud-first approach. Having already implemented Microsoft 365, the company has now turned its attention to updating the on-premises legacy customer relationship management (CRM) system it had in place.

The team at ABN AMRO chose Microsoft Dynamics 365 as the destination to take its CRM system into the future. Working with Microsoft 365 and Azure, the company has found a complete, cloud-based platform, and it is ready to transform both employee user adoption and customer satisfaction.

“Making the transition to digitalization is quite the journey for a lot of people here.”

Bo Irish Stephenson, Director of CRM at ABN AMRO, speaks candidly about the challenges that the Dutch bank has faced since it committed to implementing a raft of new digital technologies with the aim of becoming the leading bank in the Netherlands.

“New roles were put in place as we transitioned to an agile way of working, and people often said yes to those roles without really having a good understanding of what would actually be expected of them,” she explains. “But that mentality, where you confront uncertainty as an individual, or as a team, or as a whole organization — for me, that’s really what this digital transformation is all about. Exploring, learning, failing, succeeding, repeating — together.”

It is a transformation that is still in progress. Having already made the move to Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365, the organization is about to launch a revamped customer relationship management (CRM) system on Microsoft Dynamics 365 — which it hopes will shepherd in a new era of operational efficiency and innovation.

“I see digitalization as an opportunity,” says Stephenson. “But to access that opportunity, you need to fully commit, to dive in head first, and say, ‘We are doing this.’

“That takes guts in this industry,” she adds.

From proud tradition to proud transition

Headquartered in Amsterdam and employing some 18,000 people, ABN AMRO is the third largest bank in the Netherlands. “It’s a bit like Heineken,” says Stephenson. “It’s a piece of Dutch pride, a really Dutch brand — hundreds of years old.”

But despite the bank’s heritage, ABN AMRO has undergone a significant rebuild since it was acquired by a consortium led by Royal Bank of Scotland in 2007. “We went from being a rather large, even arrogant bank with a huge global presence to being a much more modest, smaller bank with just a little bit of international presence,” says Stephenson.

“There were a lot of old traditions and ways of doing things that have now changed,” she adds.

A big part of that has been the transformation of the bank’s supervisory and management boards four years ago, which heralded a new era focused on becoming a more digitally savvy institution.

“Our ambition is to be the number one Dutch bank,” says Stephenson. “That means being at the cutting edge of digital developments that are taking place in banking. Because you can’t be the number one Dutch bank if you don’t have a digital backbone.”

According to Stephenson, “pioneers” at a very senior level in the organization are driving the transition to digital banking. That includes not just the new CIO, who is extremely supportive and a key driver of the ongoing digital transformation, but also Executive Committee members that represent the business — that is, the customer. Thus, customer needs and expectations drive the digital transition.

But the push isn’t just coming from the top down. “The exciting thing about this change in our technology landscape, our processes, and our way of working is that the change is both top-down and bottom-up,” says Nicole van Leeuwen, IT Manager CRM at ABN AMRO.

“People have been starting up investigations at all levels of the organization, finding out what technology is out there, and what can be improved,” she adds.

One investigation quickly identified the company’s outdated on-premises CRM infrastructure as a system in need of improvement.

Deciding on Microsoft Dynamics 365

“When we explain to stakeholders why we’re doing this, one of the main reasons is the really low employee satisfaction score we had with our previous CRM system,” says Pepijn Brinkhoff, Lead Product Owner CRM at ABN AMRO.

The on-premises system the bank was using had been chosen over a decade before and had taken years to implement with a convoluted, bespoke setup. “The result was a very ‘user-unfriendly’ system, which had a lot of irrelevant information for people,” says Brinkhoff. Coupled with a sky-high annual cost of ownership and user adoption numbers of just 12 percent in certain areas of the business, those responsible for the CRM system knew that something had to change.

“At that time, we were also rolling out Microsoft 365,” says Brinkhoff. “So the decision was made, given that we’re rolling that out now, let’s first do a proof of concept with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and see how that goes before considering any other options.”

The proof of concept took three months to complete, with the team at ABN AMRO judging Dynamics 365 against 67 different criteria. “The capabilities offered by Dynamics 365 as a standalone product were impressive,” says Stephenson. “But it was the combination of that with Microsoft 365 and Azure that led us to give our recommendation to proceed with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and not pursue another proof of concept with another vendor.”

“When we started the proof of concept, on day one we already had the interoperation with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Outlook,” says Brinkhoff. “And authentication was also there because the Microsoft 365 team was rolling out already, put in place on the Azure platform. So all of these things were already proof points that having these three clouds already there meant that whoever built something on one of those three, it could then be used by the other two.

“The proof of concept really showed the force of having all three clouds together.”

Reaping the benefits of a fully integrated cloud solution

As with many organizations worldwide, ABN AMRO has seen a significant increase in user adoption of Microsoft Teams since the COVID-19 health crisis struck.

“When we first implemented Microsoft 365, Teams wasn’t used that widely across the business,” says Margriet Heijne, Product Owner CRM at ABN AMRO. “But since the start of COVID-19, we have seen much higher user adoption.”

“After COVID-19, you really see that Teams is the dominant way of working within ABN AMRO,” agrees Stephenson. “It’s been easy for people to use, which speaks to its intuitiveness.

“And that is the advantage of launching Dynamics 365 alongside Microsoft 365 and Azure,” she adds. “Because the look and feel, the way of working, it’s just an extension of something that everybody’s already familiar with, knows, and understands.”

The system will be used across the company to support sales, services, appointment making, interaction logging, commercial contact registration, and task management. “Around 11,000 of our customer-facing employees are going to use the new system,” says Stephenson. “People from retail, from private, commercial, corporate, and institutional banking, but also from marketing automation and data analytics.

“Ultimately, what we want to achieve is a unified, intuitive app that uses data optimally to allow our employees to deliver a customer-centric, data-driven, and agile sales and service model,” she adds. “By allowing our employees to service the customers’ needs rather than dealing with administrative demands, we can save time, reduce costs, and increase both employee and customer satisfaction — all while reducing time-to-market with new capabilities.”

When the new system is launched, Brinkhoff expects to see a significant increase in user adoption of Microsoft Dynamics 365 over the old system. “Moving people from our old, on-premises solution to this new, more intuitive platform that seamlessly works with Outlook and Teams — so you can make and take customer appointments online with ease — that should drive adoption in itself,” he says.

“But it should also drive to data,” he adds. “And to data quality, which will give us much greater insights into how people are using the system, allowing us to continually improve the experience and increase user adoption and satisfaction. That’s the approach we are taking.”

A partnership of mutual learning and respect

Besides seamlessly working with Dynamics 365, another aspect of the solution convinced the team at ABN AMRO that Microsoft was the right partner.

“It was also a cultural fit,” observes Stephenson.

“When we gave Microsoft feedback, they really took notice of what we were saying and adapted to our needs, which was fantastic.”

It is a cooperation that continues to thrive, built on mutual respect. “We thought about naming our new CRM system,” says Stephenson. “Giving it a name within the organization, so it would have a certain identity.”

She concludes, “But we stepped away from that. Because we felt that the connotations with Microsoft as a brand are so positive at the moment, we are proud to partner with Microsoft as we continue on this journey towards further digitization of the bank.”

By allowing our employees to service the customers’ needs rather than dealing with administrative demands, we can save time, reduce costs, and increase both employee and customer satisfaction — all while reducing time-to-market with new capabilities.

Bo Irish Stephenson: Director of CRM ABN AMRO

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