Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Bank Gains Competitive Edge with a Unique XML-Based Desktop Liquidity Solution
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Banking
Customer Profile
Based in Chicago, Illinois,LaSalle Bank Corporation is the parent company of LaSalle Bank N.A. and LaSalle Bank Midwest N.A., anda subsidiary of Netherlands-based ABN AMRO Bank N.V. ABN AMRO has total assets of €855.7 billion and a presence in more than 60 countries.
Business Situation
LaSalle Bank wanted to integrate a secure, reliable, and simple tool for customers to accurately calculate their cash positions using bank account data provided by its Web-based online treasury managementservice, CashPro.
Solution
LaSalle Bank createda solution that takes advantage of the XML capabilities of Microsoft® Office Excel® 2003 to automatically populate cash-position spreadsheets with live data from CashPro.
Benefits
Improves clients’ liquidity management
Saves clients hours a day
Provides a unique value-added capability
Creates a competitive edge
Increases customer loyalty / “The basic technology behind CashPro Accelerate, Excel 2003, is redefining our organization.…CashPro Acceleratewill increase the value in our client relationships unlike anything we have done before.”
Milton Santiago, Senior Vice President and Head of Electronic Banking Services, LaSalle Bank
LaSalle Bank offers a competitive range of investment, commercial, and retail banking services to clients in the United States.It wanted to streamline an onerous business process for its commercial clients: accurately and efficiently determining their daily cash position. Most clients used spreadsheets to manually enter account data provided by CashPro®, LaSalle’s online treasury management service.LaSalle Bank took advantage of the XML capabilities of Microsoft® Office Professional Edition 2003 to create a best practices cash-management Microsoft Office Excel®2003 spreadsheet that autopopulates with account data from CashPro. For customers, the solutionsaves hours daily, improves accuracy, and enables better liquidity management. The unique solution also defines the bank as a technological leader, drives customer loyalty, and generates new business.
Situation
Based in Chicago, Illinois, LaSalle Bank offers a complete range of investment, commercial, and retail banking products to clients across the United States. Its parent company, LaSalle Bank Corporation, has U.S.$110 billion in assets. LaSalle Bank Corporation is a subsidiary of one of the world’s largest banks, Netherlands-based ABN AMRO Bank N.V., which has total assets of €855.7 billion (U.S.$1.04 trillion).
In 2005, Greenwich Associates ranked LaSalle’s CashPro service at the top of the Internet-banking applicationsit surveyed, and the accolade points to the bank’s consistent focus on the customer. “We like to position ourselves as advisers to our customers,” says John Scully, First Vice President, Electronic Banking for LaSalle Bank. “We work with our customers, listen to their needs, and learn about their businesses to develop solutions that have long-term value and will generate a loyal relationship.”
LaSalle Bank is always looking to differentiate itself by focusing on partnerships andsolutions. The current economic environment—which forces bank customers to place increased emphasis on the role of liquidity and controlling costs—provided an opportunity for LaSalle Bank to improve its customer relationships. “Liquidity is becoming more and more important,” says Scully. “Cash management used to be thought of as a cost center. Now our customers are looking at their cash positions to bring revenue into the organization by investing funds, and trying to minimize costs by reducing interest paid on loans.”
LaSalle Bank wanted to help its customers more accurately calculate their cash position to better manage liquidity. It began by asking customers about their cash-management challenges. What it learned confirmed the bank’s hunch: The best approach would betoprovide a new service based on a powerful tool universally deployed among its customer base—the Microsoft® Office Excel®2003 spreadsheet software.
“We saw that 100 percent of corporate treasurers were using Excel spreadsheets to calculate their cash positions, even if they had already made significant investments in treasury workstations,” says Milton Santiago, Senior Vice President and Head of Electronic Banking Services for LaSalle Bank. “For many of our customers, treasury workstations are difficult to cost-justify and often provide more functionality than required.We heard time and time again how inflexible treasury workstationsare and how difficult they make accessing and manipulating data. Ultimately the information was input into Excel.Our clients were using PivotTable® views and formulas in Excel;however, they were worried about data accuracy, costly miskeying,and formula errors, as well as the data’s security.”
To calculate their cash position, treasurers and their assistants used LaSalle Bank’s electronic-banking service CashPro to download their bank account data througha Bank Administration Institute (BAI) data feed, or in report format. Clients then had to enter the data manually into their spreadsheets. “For a larger client that’s downloading accounting information from more than one bank, entering BAI data into a cash-position worksheet could take four hours,” explains Scully. “The client couldn’t examine the details behind the data either, and the data was only good for one day.”
As a growing number of customers expressed their need for a more efficient way to determine their cash position, LaSalle Bank began to think about ways it could accommodate its customers’ wishes. “For several years, we had been looking at creating a cash-position Excel worksheet that integrates with CashPro to streamline cash-position calculations,” recalls Santiago. “But until now, our product and the Microsoft Office software lacked maturity.”
Solution
When LaSalle Bank discovered the XML capabilities within Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, it recognized that now it could turn its idea into a viable business solution. A language that describes both the content and appearance of data, XML is used to share business information on the Web without worrying about incompatible programs, computer networks, data structures, and operating systems. Because XML is not limited to proprietary computer languages, itenables the exchange of information between normally incompatible systems.
To enable the free flow of data from CashPro directly into a customer’s XML-enabled Excel worksheet, LaSalle Bank used its existing investment in Web service interfaces to provide the link that it needed to integrate its customers’ worksheets with the CashPro solution that provides the BAI data feed.
Santiago believes that the introduction of XML into familiar desktop tools reflects the Microsoftcommitment to continual innovation in response to market needs. “Both Microsoft and LaSalle Bank listen to customers and work together to provide solutions, not just technology, that answer our customers’ business challenges.”
After working with Microsoft on the project’s conceptual framework, LaSalle Bank hired a third-party consultant to talk to 60 clients to gain a better understanding of how they calculated cash position, how they created cash forecasts, and the challenges those tasks presented.Drawingon the findings, the bank then designed a best practices Excel 2003 spreadsheet with embedded formulas. Thanks to XML support in Excel 2003, the spreadsheet would be capable of consuming automated BAI data feeds from CashPro.
Then LaSalle Bank partnered with RDA Corporation, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, to build the XML interface that would link the spreadsheet with CashPro. Initial meetings focused on the project’s parameters:
A simple distribution model
Easy, self-service installation
Lowmaintenance
Minimal training required
Locally encrypted data
“The people at RDA understood right away what we were trying to do,” recalls Scully. “They helped us improve the application through iterative prototypes and testing. Often they would take our ideas and go one step further. It was a great partnership.”
Simplifying Development with
Visual Studio .NET
RDA created the interface, using the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003 development system and Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System. “These were the perfect tools to fulfill all the project’s requirements cost-effectively,” says RDA Developer Steve Stefanovich, who acted as Principal Architect for the project. “The primary advantage of using Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Office is that we could easily distribute the Excel spreadsheet. This was important for LaSalle Bank; many of its customers’ computers are locked down, so customers can’t run an installation easily.”
Accelerating Excel 2003
“Our service is unique—customers don’t have to do anything different; they are using Excel 2003 already—yet we’vetaken an inefficient daily process and transformed it into a seamless experience with huge payoffs.”John Scully, First Vice President, Electronic Banking, LaSalle Bank
Dubbed CashPro Accelerate™, the new solution developed by LaSalle Bank in partnership with RDA is an add-in to Excel that parses BAI data into the best practices Excel cash-position worksheet designed by LaSalle Bank. CashPro is responsible for generating BAI-formatted financial data and CashPro Accelerate is the client for viewing and manipulating the data in an Excel-based interface with security enhancements. By automating the BAI feed, the solution accelerates the creation of each XML-enabled Excel cash-position worksheet.
Customers can choose from two “static” versions of CashPro Accelerate, allowing financial managers to choose between a best practices worksheet with a horizontal view of dates and data and one with a vertical view. A third version, called the Ad Hoc Spreadsheet, allows customers to create their own cash-position worksheet style. The solution is deployed to customers—who must have installed Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 or Office Enterprise Edition 2003 with the latest updates—either through onsite visits or by downloading the application from a secure Web site.
Benefits
With CashPro Accelerate, LaSalle Bank can offer its customers a value-added service that integrates seamlessly into the bank’s existing Web-based application. Data fields in a CashPro Accelerate spreadsheet are protected, which helps prevent the alteration or misinterpretation of encrypted figures. The bank’s customers can now import their account information directly from CashPro into an Excelspreadsheet running on their local machines to access real-time cash-management positions.
“No other bank is using Excel 2003 and XML to automate the calculation of liquidity,” reports Scully. “Our service is unique—customers don’t have to do anything different; they are using Excel 2003 already—yet we’ve taken an inefficient daily process and transformed it into a seamless experience with huge payoffs.”
Using CashPro Accelerate, LaSalle Bank’s customers can trust their account data in a way they couldn’t before. They are improving liquidity management, saving time, increasing data accuracy and value, sharing important information for management decision making, and integrating the solution into their back-end systems to increase thevalue of their data across the enterprise. These benefits seemed so obvious to the first user group to see a CashPro Accelerate demo that they burst into spontaneous applause.
“We kept hearing, ‘Why hasn’t thisbeen done before?’” recalls Santiago. “We have a client who made a considerable investment in a treasury workstation, but now with Excel 2003 and CashPro Accelerate, he’s discovered a more flexible and efficient way to address his reporting needs. With automated downloads, PivotTable views, and embedded formulas, the company is saving anywhere from four to eight hours a day in manual data entry and cash-position calculations across all itsbusiness units.”
Benefits to Bank Customers
Today, LaSalle Bank’s customers have more faith in their financial information.Because formulas are embedded in the spreadsheet,the solution requiresminimal data entry; therefore, there are virtually no errors. “Our clients were always concerned about making costly errors,” says Scully. “One zero in the wrong place can add up to an expensive mistake. A simple tool that delivers an accurate understanding of funds available for investment opportunities, or a better understanding of outstanding debt, is a very compelling value proposition for our customers.”
CashPro Accelerate not only enables customers to improve liquidity management—to increase investment income and reduce debt servicing—but also increases the value of that information for decision making across the enterprise. “Before, our customers could not see the details behind the data,” explains Scully. “With CashPro Accelerate, all they do is click the item, and they can see the wire transfers or checks associated with the numbers. Previously, cash-position worksheet data was only good for a day. But CashPro Accelerate saves the data on a client’s local machine, which opens up new opportunities for trend analysis to improve customers’ understanding of their liquidity management.
“CashPro Accelerate allows customers to better analyze their daily cash-management performance, something they couldn’t do before,” continues Scully. “Customers are finding this new knowledge empowering.”
LaSalle Bank’s customers can also add notes to transactions to record background information for their own use, and they can report and share that information with others. “Some of our customers tie the solution into their current Excel-based solutions that integrate into back-end processes. This improves the flow of financial information throughout the enterprise,” says Santiago.
Benefits to LaSalle Bank
In an industry sector known for competitive pressures that put a high premium on customer service, CashPro Accelerate gives LaSalle Bank an edge in the market that’s generating new business, increasing customer loyalty, and positioning the bank as a technologically savvy market leader.
“One month after launching the service at the Association for Financial Professionals Conference(AFP) last October, we had 70 potential customers,” says Scully. “Some of our customers have switched from using a treasury workstation in favor of CashPro Accelerate. We’ve had customers that were contemplating buying the treasury workstation and, after seeing our product, opted for CashPro Accelerate. It’s not difficult to sell.”
CashPro Accelerate perfectly aligns with LaSalle Bank’s branding, which emphasizes making more things possible for its clients. Because clients that begin using CashPro Accelerate are unlikely to give it up, the new solution encourages long-term customer relationships.
“The basic technology behind CashPro Accelerate, Excel 2003, is redefining our organization,” says Santiago. “Before, our customers only valued our services at the beginning and end of a process: When a client needs to obtain information or is going to perform a transaction based on that information. Expanding the franchise doesn’t happen if the only time the client thinks about LaSalle Bank is at these two endpoints—mostbanks can deliver information or process a transaction. However, when we give customerssolutions that address a real business issue—particularly one that affectsthe company’s bottom line, we truly become more involved in that company’s working capital cycle. LaSalle’s consultative, relationship-driven approach and services like CashPro Accelerate will increase the value in our client relationships unlike anything we have done before.”
Of course, it helps that CashPro Accelerate is not replaceable by an Excel-based cash-position tool from any other bank. But according to Santiago, it’s the simplicity of the solution that provides the underpinnings of its success. “Simplicity means ease of use, low up-front costs, low maintenance, and minimal training and disruption. These are all things our clients want to hear,” he says. “But for us, simplicity represents something else: seeing a different way to solve our customers’ business pains using technology they are comfortable with—regardless of where our competitors are going in the market. We listened to our customers and they gave us their problems. Microsoft gave us XML. Together we worked out a simple solution. It’s an accomplishment our clients value and we take pride in.”
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