Rabobank: Content management is crucial for virtual banking

Today Rabobank owns approximately 341 local banks, which provide financial services and products to the Dutch retail and business markets. The Rabobank Group exists of different business entities: Interpolis, Robeco and Rabobank. It has nine million business and private customers and is the market leader in virtually every area of financial services.

Challenges: Internet, Intranet and Extranet

Rabobank constantly strives to strengthen its services to customers, employees and agents as they emerge as one of the largest financial holding companies in Europe.
Today, more and more banks are looking for ways to maximize their financial services by doing business over the Internet, and to drive efficiency for their employees and agents through their Intranets. Rabobank recognizes the need to maintain a premier web presence in order to compete in today's market and meet their customers' growing needs.
With the number of changes and amount of online content increasing rapidly, the need for content management became crucial. The purpose of its Internet site is to inform customers on the many different products and services that Rabobank offers.

Benefits: scalable solution

Customers can conduct and finalize their financial transactions or administer their insurance policies online. The Rabobank Group uses its Intranet to supply employees with information and to share work related knowledge internally. The intranet also provides a purchase model for orders and registration of absentees.
After a thorough evaluation Rabobank found that Tridion R5 proved to be the most reliable, open and scalable solution. The implementation was incremental, growing from a local intranet site to become a global network of Rabobank sites used from Australia to Belgium.
Tridion enables editors to quickly add, change and remove content on the Web site without the assistance of the site's technical staff. This helps free up technical resources to be allocated to more mission critical business needs. Content moves through Tridion's workflow engine to get management approval before publishing to the live site. This allows the bank to have complete content control.
The different business entities (Rabobank, Interpolis and Robeco) have noted that Tridion has simplified many online activities - it is now possible to separate the building blocks of the Web Sites such as layout, text and illustration. This makes it easy to copy not only new pages but also an entire Web site in which various components are shared via Tridion's BluePrinting technology.

Proof: localizing content is easy

The layout and infrastructure of the Web site is permanent, ensuring brand consistency, while the content can be adjusted and localized by employees (non-technical) from different departments at any time making them responsible for their own content.
Due to the hierarchy of the Web sites and reuse of the components, changes only need
to be implemented in the BluePrint in order to automatically alter the other Web sites. This also
includes the foreign Web sites.
Working with content management has proved to be a dynamic process which has resulted in a tailor-made solution for each business entity and department. The largest project delivered successfully to date is the Personal Portal, an intranet site for more than 300 local branch offices. Currently with more than 200 authors, the projected number of authors is approaching 35,000.
With Tridion R5, new initiatives in the area of online marketing have been piloted. Interpolis, for example, is already using Tridion Outbound E-mail for its e-mail marketing campaigns such as newsletters, where the newsletter and content of the Web site are linked. This saves time in creating content. The effect the marketing activities can be measured and subsequently the content can be revised to better fit the target market at a predefined time. Learning from past experiences guarantee more successful online communication for the future!