01 February 2007 Product Reviews

 

Return to CRM

David Bannister

Sorting out the proliferation of CRM systems at Deutsche Bank was an interesting challenge. Daniel Marovitz, chief operating officer for technology, talks about his experiences.

Seasoned technology professionals in banking can generally be made to groan by asking them about their customer relationship management systems. Just the name of some large vendors can send a shiver down their spines.

“Like many large companies coming out of the tech boom, we had a proliferation of CRM systems — from big vendors, small vendors and homebuilt systems — but there hadn’t been a lot of thought of how to integrate them properly throughout the enterprise. Our position was far from unique,” says Daniel Marovitz, chief operating officer for technology in the Corporate and Investment Bank Group Division and Personal and Corporate Banking Division (PCB) of Deutsche Bank.

In late 2001, the bank started to look at the issue, which happened to coincide with a major reorganisation of the bank’s operation, giving Marovitz senior board buy-in to the project.

The bank needed to build a CRM system with the objective of replacing the CRM application previously developed in-house. The new system needed to provide the sales division with a flexible work space that links CRM information with other business-critical content to ensure an accurate, up-to-date and comprehensive overview of each client relationship. The main goal was that the new application should improve customer relationship quality, increase service efficiency and make the client more attuned to customer needs.

“In the end we decided that we had to ditch everything, for all sorts of reasons,” says Marvitz. Originally, it was started as an in-house project, but it was always the intention to “move it offshore as fast as possible”. It was decided to work with outsourcing provider Luxsoft, based in Moscow, which worked in close collaboration with the bank’s global corporate finance division, to develop a CRM web portal.

“CRM is a nice fancy term, but if you really peel back the onion, what it sounded like was a web portal: we wanted a standard interface into a bunch of disparate systems, intuitive and easy to use — like a My Yahoo portal,” says Marovitz.

The application was deployed within a portal framework and is based on a three-tier architecture. Employing a three-tier design with the database and application installed on the server dramatically simplifies system maintainance, load balancing, upgrades and configuration. System users need only a standard web browser. The architecture works regardless of user operating system, thus avoiding the need to create different applications to accommodate different operating systems. All data is stored in an Oracle database and is retrieved through the business-logic layer and displayed via a web-based user interface.

An innovation introduced into the web-based system is the use of a module called Think Map that displays client data in three dimensions, making it easy to analyse a lot of data in one graphic. Adding further convenience, the system’s interface gives sales staff access to all system functions and client information from one location and each user has the ability to customise their own application environment to best suit individual needs and preferences. The application’s interface is intuitive and presents bank staff with a look and feel in concert with the most well-known and popular business applications.

Working with Luxoft helped the bank to understand the issues of the current system and to improve the business process flow within the bank. As a result of the implementation of the new CRM system, the time taken for data entry within the bank has been significantly reduced. For example, the time required to log a call report decreased from 8 minutes to 3 minutes, which results in 750 hours saved per month.

The new CRM system provides a single point of access to corporate clients’ data to all the parties and brought together sales, global relationship managers and senior investment bankers across the client organisation. The system is three times faster than its predecessor and the new functionality allows bankers to manage customer relationships in a more interactive and intelligent way.

The new system integrates with the majority of customer applications in the bank database schemas, loading mechanisms and infrastructure, allowing the client to deliver updated business information to bankers as soon as it is available. The project achieved a high degree of ROI, estimated at a saving of between 30% and 40% compared to conducting the project onshore.