Sink or swim By Stuart Lauchlan There

Sink or swim
By Stuart Lauchlan

There’s a lot riding on Abbey National’s new CRM implementation. The bank is putting all its muscle behind CRM technology in an effort to reconnect with its customers, quash its recent financial troubles and save one of the UK’s most recognisable brands.

As Ambrose McGinn happily declares, “Banking is boring”. For a man who’s responsible for driving major strategic initiatives at a leading UK financial-services company, McGinn has a cheerfully blunt reaction to its core business. “When people are walking down the high street, they walk quicker past the banks.”

It’s a stand that comes as something of surprise given that McGinn is speaking as strategic development and retail e-commerce director for Abbey National, the UK’s sixth-largest banking group as measured by assets. However, it’s also one that reflects entirely the group’s current desire to reinvent itself during what its chairman Lord Burns has described as “a transitional year” for the company.

To that end, McGinn has found himself one of the champions of ‘One on One’, the biggest single project under way within Abbey National as the firm rolls out a Siebel-based customer relationship management (CRM) implementation. Its aim is to bring the bank closer to its 16 million customers and reinvent itself in a whole new guise, complete with coffee shops in branches and Woody Allen quotes adorning the walls.

“We want customers to see us as a retailer,” explains McGinn. “What we want is to be a fantastic retailer. There is so much we can learn from retailers in terms of speed to market, a sense of theatre and the whole emphasis and approach that we take. That approach should be the approach taken by banks.

“Our strapline of making customers’ lives easier is not rocket science,” he continues. “It’s deliberately easy to understand. As a business, if we’re doing something that doesn’t make a customer’s life easier, then we should stop it.

Banks really are experts at complicating lives and gold champions at not treating customers as individuals. We want to treat our customers on a one-on-one basis: one view of the customer, one way of delivering better service and one brand identity.”

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