Client : Association of Foreign Banks

Web : www.foreignbanks.org.uk

The Association of Foreign Banks (The AFB), as its name suggests, is an organisation that serves the interests of non UK banks who are operating in this country

The AFB has over 150 members ranging from some of the world's biggest banks down to some of the smallest. The role of the AFB is to provide a forum for the sharing of information on industry issues for the mutual benefit of the members and to make effective representation to the UK government, to regulatory odies and to industry as well as other peer group associations.

Foreign banks of whatever size do not necessarily have the same 'voice' that UK domestic institutions have and working as a collective can sometimes be far more effective.

As well as being a vehicle for representing views the AFB has a very active role in enabling interaction amongst the members and in providing events that will pass on critical information in an increasingly complex environment.

A look at the AFB website will reveal that current seminars include topics such as a regulatory overview as well as both taxation and insolvency. To do this effectively, the Association must have a complete and up to date record of not only who the member organisations are but also of all the relevant contacts within those organisations.

Historically, keeping up to date records of all the contacts and particularly of their roles was something of a problem for the Association

Firstly, there were quite a large number of contacts who were highly mobile between organisations and very often, in the smaller banks, multi role.

As James Tree, who is a board member and secretary of the AFB, explains " We had a complicated card record of each organisation and its members and a procedure for printing out sticky labels for each different interest area.
We only have a very small staff and this was laborious to say the least, difficult to keep up to date and incapable of providing a mechanism that would allow the members to interact with each other."

The solution to the Associations problem lay, inevitably, with technology - but less inevitably - without a great deal of complexity or expense. Advised by Greenwich based accredited Maximizer CRM specialist - Wavehill - the AFB developed an approach that is elegant in its simplicity.

Using the Maximizer CRM system details of all member organisations can be kept along with the contacts and their multi layered responsibilities

This in itself solves the AFB's 'who does what problem' but Wavehill were able to add a refinement that conferred a real interactivity for the members.

Wavehill custom wrote a uplink module that, in a few minutes, takes the contacts from Maximizer and publishes them on the AFB website

A once only entry process so that the AFB doesn't have to carry out any work at the website end.

Any AFB member can now search for a contact within another organisation or possibly a group of contacts. So, for example, a search might be made for all risk managers within Italian and Spanish banks. This would have been impossible before but now is a very straightforward process (emails can be sent direct from the AFB website).

As a result of some simple but well executed technology, the Association of Foreign Banks has been able to extend its remit to the members by providing a dynamic interactivity as well as the high level functions of an industry forum.

It's certainly easy to understand why James Tree isn't joking when he says that he "couldn't imagine life without it".