Each year Banking & Finance, the European Platform for Financial Professionals, awards an organisation within the Financial Services industry in the BeLux for a realized project, which has been truly innovative and fully operational in accordance with customer satisfaction and has been part of the daily business routine. The nominees for Belux 2008 were ING Bank (Oracle), Argenta (Kluwer), ABN Amro (InterAccess and Dialogues) and Argenta (Credon, PKF and QlikTech).

The Argenta Project
In today’s business environment both transparency and customer orientation are critical success factors. Argenta perfectly understood how to combine both but did feel the need to become even more customer oriented. The company succeeded in doing this by means of analytical instruments showing individual customer value through customer segmentation and profitability. But if Argenta wanted to get smarter about their customers, they needed to be able to turn customer data into actionable information.

The project objective was to set up a ‘segmentation concept’ for Argenta’s agents and customers, with simple well-defined parameters for the company’s banking and insurance activities. With this approach a ‘value concept’ was created where the customer value is the reference rather than profitability and/or risk parameters.

The ‘value concept’ is the base for grading customers and prospects. This helps the independent agent to apply the right priorities during the entire sales process. An aggregation concept, which was build in QlikView, for the customers, customer families, agents, supervisors and the distribution channel ensures that everybody is weighted in the same manner.

Credon used QlikView, QlikTech’s flagship product named the fastest growing Business Intelligence software vendor by IDC, to develop interfaces and dashboards using the parameters which were defined by PKF into the value concept for Argenta. To date, the QlikView deployment at Argenta involves functionalities to monitor customer potential and value for several product divisions.

The application is available for directors and employees of the independent bank agents and provides them insight into the business, the market and product shifts. Another remarkable aspect of this innovative project was the fast return on investment that has already been realized based on the extremely short implementation cycle.

“We are extremely proud about this achievement. During our collaboration with PKF, QlikTech and our customer Argenta we all shared the same philosophy: a pragmatic approach to get things done! Smart ideas, clever tools and a no-nonsense culture, formed the ideal cocktail for immediate business value and industry-wide recognition,” says Ronny Beckers, Partner at Credon.

“The customer value model is based on key principles like simplicity, transparency an easy to use. These elements make the difference for the bank agents in the field,” says Wim Vanderstraeten, Partner PKF.

“It was a wonderful and great experience to work with Credon, PKF and Agenta. We are proud to be able to deliver an innovative project that provides results and added business value immediately, especially in today’s uncertain economic environment. Joining our 10,000 customers globally, Argenta will now be able to analyze the information they want with the detail they need to make the right decisions every day,” added Rogier Verheij, Vice President QlikTech Benelux.