From its humble roots as a money lender for farm workers, Rabobank has blossomed into one of the most reputable and forward-thinking financial institutions in the world. In its home market of the Netherlands, the Rabobank Group has over nine million business and private customers and is a market leader in virtually every area of financial services. With the group now represented in almost 40 countries and 140 locations throughout the world, its early success has been surpassed by its modern day achievements.

Rabobank was formed over 100 years ago, created as a cooperative membership institution to provide credit to farmers in the Netherlands. Helping mostly local farm workers to sustain their financial security, and showing dedication to the community in general, the cooperative movement saw rapid growth as local prosperity soared. The local Rabobanks, of which there are now almost 400, together form Rabobank Nederland, serving retail and business clients in over 1,500 branch offices and through many different channels, including the Internet.

As well as being the most successful online bank in the Netherlands, a recent Nielsen//NetRatings study showed it to be the most visited Internet banking site in the whole of Europe. Rabobank, with 1.3 million unique users in October 2002, rated as the best performing Internet bank in Europe and the fourth best in the world.

What do you see as the main reasons for the growth and success of Rabobank, especially in Web-based banking?
WdJ: A few years ago we reviewed our processes and strategies as a bank and came to the conclusion that we must change from a business-centric model to a customer-centric one. This has affected every aspect of our working environment and has included a complete overhaul of the organisation from procedures, systems and processes to the mindset, behavioural skills and attitudes of our employees.

It has changed the way we roll out products and services and we will always look at customer value first. So we are continuously looking for ways to improve our service and delivery capabilities, although we have a good history of offering our customers innovative self-services and we were the first Dutch bank to give customers ATMs for instance. We started offering online banking in its present form over five years ago as another way to offer customer value and have adapted it to our customer-centric strategy.

Presumably undergoing this organisational overhaul was a massive undertaking. What was the reaction from staff and customers alike?
WdJ: To do this we really looked internally at ourselves as an organisation and believe that to further our digital ambitions we had to give our employees the opportunity to voice their opinions. They have become our technology test pilots as they have the inside knowledge of the organisation and the intimate knowledge of our customers, so their input is invaluable.

Our customers are already seeing the benefits through services and delivery options that are tailored specifically for them. And this doesn't just mean their PC, but many other devices where they are able to access account details etc.

Such as?
FV: Well, like the PC, the mobile phone and other mobile devices are becoming an important tool for e-commerce. The term 'anytime, anywhere, anyhow' certainly applies at Rabobank.

What kind of investments are you making in this area?
WdJ: At Rabobank, investments in mobility depend on the progress of the technology and the social acceptance of new mobile services. About a year and a half ago we began developing a strategy that looked upon the mobile as your very own remote control for a wide range of services. And we expect this vision to be established in the next five to ten years from now.

The vision behind this strategy is that mobile is no longer subject to a technology boom. The technology boom ended with the developments surrounding WAP, where consumers just weren't interested in it because of its limitations. Because of our customer-centric approach we then had to evaluate the way we looked at mobility and asked the question: 'what is mobile?'

What was the outcome?
WdJ: We found that WAP phones were simply too slow and too limited to make mobile banking possible in an efficient and user-friendly way. Two and a half years ago we saw performance problems and at the time we didn't expect any of our customers to get excited over WAP and decided to focus our efforts on GPRS.

We've now had GPRS services running for over a year and are the content providers for i-Mode in Holland, where we have our own Rabobank/i-Mode Web site. We're also preparing for our implementation of a Vodafone Live service. We strongly believe that in five years time, with the capabilities of GPRS, i-Mode, and our Vodafone Live multimedia content platform implementation, the mobile phone will act as the remote control to various services as the multimedia capabilities are here for it to do so.

FV: And also, in general our investments in technology have been restricted to getting the correct infrastructure in place and developing business cases in line with our strategy. We still face problems with connecting different channels to our back-office. The re-use of existing logic for new channels is also problematic. We are now looking for ways to solve these inhibitors. Web services can certainly be the answer for this and we are keeping a close eye on developments.

Your judgement in relation to WAP proved to be good, but what exactly attracted you to GPRS for banking services?
WdJ: The reason we concentrated our efforts on GPRS in its early stages, rather than moving to WAP like a number of other banks, is the overall user capabilities such as increased data transmission speeds, users only being charged for actual usage rather than for the duration of connection, the ability for location-based or 'push' data, users being able to surf the Internet whilst on a voice call, and the list goes on. In fact, it seems to deliver on all the things that WAP just couldn't.

Many operators and solution providers are developing applications and platforms, such as Vodafone Live and i-Mode, where the user experience is a very, very rich one. This fits in with our strategy of customer-centricity and was the main reason that we have concentrated on GPRS in favour of WAP.

Your strategy of involving all staff in the decision making process has clearly worked, but exactly what has this involved?
FV: A good example of this is our mobile home office service. In July of 2001, at the beginning of our new mobile strategy, we looked into the possibility of providing our employees with all the functions that they could experience at the office on a mobile phone. This was to empower them to complete work processes on the move, in any location, and also to allow them to experience the technology that is on the market. For the bank this had two main benefits, firstly our staff had access to the very latest technology, and secondly, that through using this service they would be able to highlight areas they feel would benefit our customers. As such, we are always able to actively seek their suggestions on areas of functionality for instance.

What did this project involve?
FV: We originally ran a pilot study of 20 users to give them access to Mobile Outlook. And the idea is that it is not one device that fits all; we eventually wanted our staff to run this service on their own mobile devices instead of us supplying all the devices ourselves.

What main partners were involved in this?
FV: The main players involved were KPN Telecom, Compaq and Fenestrae. KPN had responsibility for the network, Compaq delivered iPaq devices and Fenestrae supplied the software.

What capabilities were you looking for in the software?
FV: We chose Fenestrae's Enterprise Mobility Server (EMS) solution because of its ability to enable multi-channel access to SMS, i-Mode, and the Web through our Microsoft Exchange messaging system. Its modular architecture was also important as it gives us the flexibility to pick and choose components that would best satisfy our needs.

It is a software solution that is available straight out of the box and as EMS is completely XML-based, the product also allows for full support of applications developed in other languages. During the project itself, the front-end to back-end architecture worked smoothly, as we expected, and through the XML capabilities of EMS it integrated well with our existing systems.

Fenestrae is a very reliable company and the level of support and services they provided was superb. This was a major factor for the IT managers involved in the whole sales process and pilot.

How did you overcome any security problems?
FV: EMS communicates to the front-end and back-end servers through the 128-bit SSL protocol, which provided the necessary high-level of security. Authentication of staff through the Web and to mail functions was done via normal user-ID and password settings in the device and in the front-end server.

So, what functionality did this provide your staff?
FV: It sounds simple, but through testing we were able to give them most of the functions they have with their office Outlook on their mobile devices. So, they had access to calendars, mail, agendas, tasks, contacts list, everything they would expect from the office. And because they are familiar with Outlook, the time it took for them to get used to the service was minimal.

One of the areas that attracted us most to the solution was its ability to provide extensive alerts and push features, allowing applications to push messages to our users through Exchange. One good example of this is where the project team were able to receive SMS alerts on their mobile device each morning with their calendar for the day.

Your staff are mainly office-based, so when were they using the service?
FV: About 20 per cent of our staff work as managers, project managers or consultants who work in multiple locations and travel a lot. For these employees, the added value is obvious: check the agenda in the morning and read e-mail on the road. Also, we found that staff were using this service at home, especially at weekends. It was even used during their holidays where we found that it was used almost as much as a normal working day. It gave them the opportunity to view important meeting schedules, for example, on the way to work or over breakfast so that they had more time to prepare.
In fact, the pilot study lasted a total of 16 weeks and staff made over 2,000 connections with 20,000 actionable requests.

Did this save them much time?
FV: Absolutely. We had our finance department complete a detailed analysis and we found that users were saving up to an hour a week in work time. As such, they were able to concentrate on other work areas. When you take into account wages, better working practices, etc., then this amounts to a substantial saving.

What was the reaction from staff?
FV: They really liked the service. Most were extremely pleased with the functionality and connection times it offered and the time-saving aspect it gave them. They stated that the ability to consult this type of information from wherever they wished, whenever they wanted to, was a huge plus point.

Has this now been rolled out to all staff?
FV: Because of the extremely positive reaction we received from the pilot, where users said that after using the service they couldn't work without it, we began working on a mass rollout. We are soon to go live with the system at our headquarters in Holland and the system will easily be able to cope with our 6,000 employees. Early next year this will be extended to include our local offices and a further 33,000 staff, where we expect 20 per cent of employees to be users.

This hasn't required much additional work for us because of the investment we have already made in our Microsoft-based infrastructure and the compatibility, scalability and agility of the EMS software.

We firmly believe that our successes in online banking and mobility will continue because of the way we have, through the use of innovative technology such as Fenestrae's EMS, been able to offer staff and customers the services they need, when they need them.