Coolprofs

Clients

Tailor-made loans for mid-sized businesses in the Netherlands

Han Reitsema Senior Vice President, ABN AMRO Bank:

“"In realising this system on time, we certainly hold the trumps as regards efficient, commercial credit operations in the Netherlands.””

Assignment

Working in close collaboration with end-users, build an application to support a new, more efficient procedure for approving commercial loans.

Motivation

ABN Amro Bank aims to continually improve its lending services, especially the areas customer satisfaction, risk management and efficiency.

Management set a target of four months for trying out the new procedure at a number of advisory offices so that the advantages for the business and the customer could become apparent.

Approach

As a result of positive feedback on earlier projects at ABN Amro Bank, COOLProfs was selected to build the new system with Allfusion:Gen on the basis of fixed price, fixed date and fixed quality.

At the outset of the project, it was possible to rough in the outlines of the new procedure but the actual functionality still had to take shape in parallel with development. COOLProfs was able to cope with this uncertainty by using the incremental prototyping method of DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method) . In this way, business expertise and insight gained as the project progressed could be incorporated in the system without endangering pilot and production schedules.

The close cooperation between employees of COOLProfs and ABN Amro Bank in a multidisciplinary team was of crucial importance. In this team, and in the steering committee, decisions were made quickly while at all times taking into consideration the implications for both the business and IT.

Results

• The loan approval system was delivered on time, within budget and complies with the quality requirements of ABN Amro Bank.

• The pilot started on time and its findings were implemented in the final version which went into production on time.

• The new procedure for approving commercial loans and the system have already proved their worth in practice.

• As a result of the user-friendliness of the system, the new procedure was readily accepted.

• Because the assessment, price calculation and authorisation have been automated, the bank can make qualitatively better offers and processing times are shorter.