NIBC Case Study

NIBC is the enterprising retail and commercial bank for entrepreneurs. The bank prides itself on its forward-thinking, can-do attitude and ‘yes’ mentality that allows it to be agile and flexible. The bank thinks and acts like an entrepreneur to support corporate clients in building their businesses.

NIBC caters to enterprising, independent-minded retail customers for whom NIBC Consumer Bank offers straightforward, transparent products, including residential mortgages and online savings deposits via NIBC Direct in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. NIBC Commercial Bank offers a host of services to corporates, management teams, private equity firms and institutional investors, including debt and capitalization advisory, M&A, financing, and equity/co-investment.

NIBC’s expertise spans debt and equity mezzanine, mergers & acquisitions, capitalization advisory, leveraged finance and structured finance. NIBC has offices in The Hague, Brussels, Frankfurt and London.

When the iPad was released in 2010, NIBC immediately identified its potential for serving customers. An innovation team was created and select employees were given iPads to experiment. However, with a lack of mobile security and management tools in the marketplace, it was deemed too early to roll out the iPad for business.

Subsequently, with the availability of enterprise-grade security tools like MDM for the iPad and smartphones, NIBC decided to revisit plans for the digital workplace in 2013. A digital workplace initiative was launched, through which employees could be productive anytime, anywhere.

A challenge faced by NIBC was how to make the innovative mobile workplace initiative conform to strict regulatory conditions, while being user-friendly. Falling short on either front would doom the project from the outset.

To drive the initiative, the Project Group identified the following key business scenarios for the bank:

• Document management / record management – Store documents centrally in such a way that they can be found later on. Reduce document chaos associated with having many versions of the same documents floating around. Important documents need to be converted to records without having to be manually classified and stored.
• Personal productivity – Enable workers to realize new levels of productivity through the use of shared documents, tasks, digital notebooks, etc.
• Digital meetings – Enable workers to access meeting documents, take meeting minutes and easily share them with colleagues, thereby saving valuable time, while cutting paper use.
• Digital client contacts – Make it easy for workers, especially mobile workers to find and maintain accurate and up-to-date contact lists. There are also plans to collaborate with external stakeholders in virtual data rooms.
• Collaboration – Enable workers to share documents while working on projects and customer engagements.
• Workflows– Incorporate and automate document and collaboration activities into defined business processes, in order to ensure compliance and to increase productivity.
• Knowledge sharing – Make it easy and fast for workers to find colleagues who can help them complete work tasks and provide relevant information.

By enabling these business use cases, workers could provide superior service to customers with less effort, thereby increasing the bank’s competitive market position, while at the same time, fulfilling the regulatory compliance dictated by the Dutch Central Bank (DNB).

“Mobile is not a separate strategy. It’s just a part of the new digital workplace. harmon.ie provides the consistent user experience across the desktop and mobile devices needed to help us realize the digital workplace."
- Wybe Koolstra – Innovation Manager Digital Workspace at NIBC Bank

Realizing that user adoption is the linchpin of project success, NIBC invested a tremendous amount of forethought into rolling out its workplace initiative.

The Innovation Group set up an ‘Experience Center’ where workers could come to try new technologies. Encouraged to do so via periodic notifications, many workers took advantage of two-hour ‘get acquainted’ sessions to try SharePoint 2013 and harmon.ie and practice how to use it to access SharePoint documents and collaborate with colleagues. Then, before harmon.ie was rolled out, a one-hour refresher course was provided to all workers. On ‘go-live’ day, workers were ready to go.

But the Project Group didn’t take any chances. Before the launch, select workers from each department were selected and trained as experts with whom co-workers could consult to answer questions about SharePoint and harmon.ie. These power users were familiar with their department’s business processes; as such they were uniquely qualified to instruct colleagues how to use harmon.ie and SharePoint to get business done. These workers were given t-shirts and hats to identify them as experts and were encouraged to ‘walk the floors’ to help their colleagues.

In order to become a success and to fulfill regulatory requirements, NIBC realized they need to get a high rate of adoption early on. To ensure this occurred, NIBC emphasized to workers the business values associated with the initiative. Plus, they notified workers that the network file shares were going to be shut down as part of the rollout. Workers were able to access documents on network shared drives for a limited period in ‘read-only’ mode, after which documents were archived. Subsequent access to SharePoint documents was to be done via harmon.ie.

To streamline the rollout process, the Project Group began the deployment with select ‘code red’ users, most notably parts of consumer Bank, Private Equity and Human Resource employees – those personnel who have access to the bank’s most sensitive information; information that has to be reported to the Dutch Central Bank. Using ‘lessons learned,’ the roll out was extended to ‘orange’ users and then to the ‘green’ users, i.e. IT personnel.

NIBC made four important rollout decisions that contributed to the project’s success.

• It mandated that document access and sharing must be done strictly from SharePoint
• It ensured that workers would be eager and able to use SharePoint; first by providing harmon.ie as the user interface for SharePoint, thereby delivering a user-friendly experience that was uniform from all devices – desktop and mobile
• It provided the necessary training and incentives for the project to be successful
• It rolled out the solution in stages, taking advantage of lessons learned to improve subsequent roll out stages.