KBC (ČSOB) Slovakia Case Study

Organization

The ČSOB group is a leading player in the Slovak financial services industry and is a part of the KBC Group. Combining the power of its retail brands – ČSOB (banking, insurance, asset management, leasing and factoring) and other members of the financial group – ČSOB group holds strong market positions in all segments of Slovak financial market.

The KBC Group is an integrated bank-assurance group, catering mainly to retail customers, small and medium-sized enterprises and private banking clientele. It occupies leading positions on its home markets of Belgium and Central and Eastern Europe, where it specializes in retail bank-assurance and asset management activities, as well as in the provision of services to businesses.
The Group is also active in a selection of other countries in Europe in private banking and services to businesses. Elsewhere around the globe, the Group has established a presence in selected countries and regions.

Challenge – Increased Technical Flexibility & Market Adaptability

As part of an on-going Group initiative aimed at strengthening its market position and executing a strategic business transformation through the delivery a new multichannel self-service platform, ČSOB (and the KBC Group as a whole) was seeking to leverage its existing portal technology standards and framework by extending their use across multiple country subsidiaries.

In 2010, the Emeldi Group successfully delivered to the portal framework – a modular and sharable asset component (using the Liferay solution stack as the primary building block) – to the Group’s sister company – ČSOB CZ – in the Czech Republic. Following its success, the Emeldi Group was chosen once again to employ the framework through a similar delivery of a bank website to the Slovak member of the Group.

As a result, through establishing a synergy between the two organizations’ portal applications, the programme sought to be able to shift focus from its ICT efforts more towards achieving its primary programme objectives:

  • Transformation into a customer-centric innovative organization
  • A value proposition that focuses on multi-channel access and cross channel distribution increasing customer convenience to become a Customer and buy a product via every channel and thus support customer acquisition
  • Extending the service offering – banking and non-banking – to customers thus boost loyalty
  • Shorten time to market – by introducing innovative approach to the new services implementation challenge

ČSOB Group wanted to execute a business transformation program called the Self Service Platform (SSP) in order to strengthen its position as a leading financial services provider in the Czech market. The program was driven by the following objectives:

Transformation into a customer-centric organization
A value proposition that focused on simplicity and convenience through multi-channel access and cross channel distribution, to increase customer convenience and thus loyalty
Extend the service offering – banking and non-banking to customers via integration with group members, government and 3rd parties
Shorten time to market by introducing innovative approach to the new services implementation

Resolution

As a programme prerequisite, ČSOB mandated for the implementation not only to both progress rapidly and achieve focus on areas where it could differentiate from its competitors, but also to take advantage of the vast accumulated knowledge base and experiences by leveraging already in-place Liferay portal solution and standards.
With the objective of “not re-inventing the wheel” in mind, the primary portion of the portal implementation project was delivered from the ground-up within 3 months in accordance with the existing portal framework, utilizing existing experience, and realizing significant time and cost savings.

ČSOB was able to deploy a new web-portal solution and online sales channel fulfilling the following business objectives:

  • To increase active customer acquisition enabling for prospects to become new customers on-line
  • To create an on-line environment for acquired customers to cross over to ČSOB as their primary bank
  • To generate additional income by enabling on-line shopping for standalone products

Business Value Added

Following the Emeldi Group’s delivery of portal framework, and implementation project in the Czech Republic, the KBC Group was eager to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework concept with an additional successful implementation within a distinct sister company within the group. Through the deployment of a second portal based on the portal framework in Slovakia, the KBC Group‘s initial portal investments have started to bear its fruit and will continue to do so through further potential portal development projects throughout Europe.

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