Fortis Bank uses Neolane in a midsourced solution for mission-critical content delivery

Fortis Bank uses Neolane to deliver personalised, multilingual and time-bound financial content across multiple channels in a B2B solution. The solution has users both within and outside the organisation and is deemed mission critical.

Background
Fortis Bank is an international financial services provider catering to private, business and institutional customers. Occupying a position as one of the top 20 European banking institutions, Fortis Bank is active in the fields of banking, insurance and investment. The company's Merchant Banking division provides integrated financial services to large companies, banks and institutions and its Global Markets Research Department plays a decisive role in directing its commercial strategy for key accounts.

Context
The seventy-five analysts at Fortis Bank Global Markets located in 5 countries (Netherlands, United States, France, Spain, Belgium), generate one hundred or so publications every day, including strategic analyses and economic reports written for 5,500 institutional clients, representing approximately 100,000 active subscriptions. Subscribers receive information according to their chosen areas of interest: markets, sectors, securities, etc. And this information must be delivered in the morning before the markets open. Depending on the content, Fortis Bank publications are delivered via different channels: on-line on the Fortis Bank Web site, personalised e-mail with attachments and/or hyperlinks, routing to specialist data vendors (Bloomberg, Multex, Reuters), print-based delivery and outsourced routing, etc.

Challenge
Each month, Fortis Bank sends in the region of 500,000 e-mails, each one personalised according to multiple conditions: document type (daily reports, analysis), economic sectors, markets, securities, specified language, etc.

“Our customers demand information but at the same time are bombarded with it! They appreciate it when the information is tailored to their needs and available in a timely manner”, explains Christophe Juillard, Global Markets Project Manager. For this reason, Fortis Bank paid close attention to the choice of subscription options and to the fully-secure automation of the delivery channels.

The Choice of Neolane
Today, the multi-channel delivery system at Fortis Bank is fully based on Neolane software: subscriber-profile management, segmentation, personalisation, distribution, tracking, reporting, etc.

Each document to be published is classified according to specific criteria: economic sector, company, language, market. Neolane comes into play here: the documents to be delivered are routed to the Neolane E-Delivery module via a Web Services call. Based on the defined document characteristics, targeting is automatically performed by matching documents with customer requests. Neolane then triggers a delivery workflow based on pre-defined business rules. These are: publish to the Fortis Bank Web site, check rendering, then send an e-mail containing hyperlinks to the hosted document, and finally deliver the content to companies specialised in financial data. Each step of the process is triggered within half a second of the other.

Benefits
Selected in September 2004 following a call for tenders, Neolane’s solution already included advanced workflow capabilities and its unique mid-sourcing architecture made it particularly attractive. Part of the Neolane software is insourced: It integrates snugly with the existing systems and enables the customer database and business rules to be maintained internally. The Neolane E-Delivery module, on the other hand, is hosted by a service provider who provides the necessary bandwidth and power to quickly execute deliveries that are sometimes extremely large, in the region of 3 GB in a few minutes… 

“If we had to manage the delivery side in-house, it would have represented too big an investment—servers, infrastructure, communication lines. This way we get the best of both worlds: hosting and in-sourcing. And of course, Neolane represented extremely good value for money”.

• Reduced time to market. “Today, our publications are delivered to our customers’ e-mail platforms within minutes of us starting the automatic process. This has slashed our time-to-market by a factor of at least three”. In the realm of finance, such reactivity is a major trump card for Fortis Bank.
• Cost reduction. Fortis Bank has cut recurring costs for e-mail delivery by 70%. “This represents a return on investment in under 10 months”.
• Improved quality of service. With three possible preferences for each subscription, Fortis Bank provides its customers with a level of personalisation that is much appreciated. This functionality improves customer perception substantially.
• Future proof. “We wanted to make sure the chosen solution could evolve with us. For this reason we opted for Neolane’s software system approach. We are convinced of the openness of this solution and of its scalability”.

Future plans
The next step is reaction management. Neolane has the requisite functionality to show which subscribers have clicked on which messages, which hyperlinks and which documents. “All this data is very important and we are intend to include it in our customer database for both sales and research reasons”. The Research Department will be able to receive feedback on how subscribers receive their work. This will almost certainly lead to new approaches and a readjustment of available material. Certain publications may be enriched and others repositioned. The Sales Department will be able to tailor its strategies to the usage patterns of clients. “We will be able to identify which subscribers are interested by which securities and who are potential buyers of these same securities”.

Download the Fortis Bank customer success story in PDF format ( PDF - 85 Kb)