Digital Asset Management for ABN AMRO: Taking Digital Experiences to the Next Level

ABN AMRO is the third-largest bank in the Netherlands and has a clear mission: “Banking for better, for generations to come.” ABN AMRO aims to be a reliable partner that creates long-term value for its customers and is there for them during the important moments in their lives. This goal serves as the bank’s guiding principle. This also applies to its communication with customers, through providing a personalized and valuable customer experience and a positive employee experience.

Revised Content Strategy

To achieve an optimal user experience, the bank took a close look at its content strategy, application landscape, and marketing tools. It concluded that the current technical infrastructure was under strain and could no longer meet future requirements. In addition, employees were having difficulty navigating the existing tools, such as the CMS (Content Management System). Led by its internal team, the bank set out to find a solution with clear objectives in mind. ABN AMRO aims to:

• offer all customers a personalized experience

• deliver personalized content across various channels

• standardize content assets

• increase the efficiency of the entire content lifecycle—from creation to publication across all channels

• simplify the application landscape

• Improve brand consistency

• Optimize the performance and stability of marketing tools

Central content hub for digital assets

ABN AMRO concluded that implementing Sitecore Content Hub was the best way to improve all aspects through a single central hub for their digital assets, content management, and distribution. The bank engaged Sitecore Platinum Partner Macaw for consulting and implementation because we possess the necessary knowledge and experience and had two Sitecore Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) working on the project.

Alignment with Objectives

Since the bank’s vision and desired direction had been established for some time, Macaw organized a series of workshops in the initial phase to quickly reach agreement on the scope, timeline, and services to be delivered, and to identify potential risks at an early stage.

Macaw followed the well-known five-phase methodology. This approach was a decisive success factor, as it makes execution predictable and manageable in every phase.

Benefits

In addition to improving the customer experience by creating relevant, personalized content delivered on the customer’s preferred device, the bank was able to achieve significant cost savings and increase employee efficiency thanks to the optimized content workflow, centralized Digital Asset Management, and content creation, the bank was also able to achieve significant cost savings and increase employee efficiency. The cumbersome and manual process of downloading images, resizing them, and then sending them to colleagues via email or sharing them via Dropbox with a specific file size limit is now a thing of the past at ABN AMRO. With 4,000 pages to manage and 1,300 files to upload each month, the improved user-friendliness results in significant time savings. Issues with drafting texts have also been resolved, and manual work has been replaced by automated message delivery.

Bank employees and external partners can manage content such as images, videos, marketing materials, and icons in a Content Hub, which makes it easier to find the right file. Workflows for sharing drafts, gathering feedback, and obtaining approvals have also become more efficient, flexible, and time-saving. The system’s ease of use has already made a name for itself at ABN AMRO.

Nathalja Nijman, Product Owner for “Customer Content Capability” at ABN AMRO, says:

“We receive requests—for example, from the intranet team—asking if they can also use Sitecore, because it’s so easy to use, saves time, and eliminates frustration. That’s the best proof that it works.”

Better SEO ranking

Thanks to the Digital Asset Management solution, which scales images directly from the system—thereby reducing the load time of each page—the pages achieve significantly better rankings, leading to more leads, more online sales, and higher revenue.

Serving Customers with the Best Digital Tools

Sitecore Content Hub is ABN AMRO’s first Digital Asset Management tool, and Nathalja Nijman is very pleased with this move. She says: “We can now offer our customers the best digital assets, tailored to their device and channel preferences. Furthermore, the optimized SEO rankings of the product pages are leading to an increase in online sales and the discoverability of our services.”

Adam Overdevest, IT Lead for Digital Channel & Content Capability at ABN AMRO, adds:

“ABN AMRO has taken a major step toward the mature use of digital assets. This enables smarter and more efficient asset management and has a positive impact on our collaboration with our clients.”