Range Of Its Services For Corporate Customers example essay topic

The Alliance and Leicester is an above all a mortgage specialist and intends to remain one. The financial Group has been operating since 1853 and offers a range of products and loan and insurance services throughout the UK. The Alliance and Leicester operates through 310 branches and 17,500 post offices. It has focused on so-called tradition savings, current account, credit card, consumer credit (housing and cars) and cash products.

The company also provides a variety of insurance and pension services. The services offered are traditional ones, and the Alliance and Leicester has proved its effectiveness in this field. Key Success Factors Key success factors concern the product attributes, competencies, competitive capabilities, and market achievements with the greatest direct bearing on company profitability. The Company was floated on the stock market in 1997 and now firmly established as a major financial services provider committed to provide customers with a wide range of mortgage, investment, insurance services, cash transmission and corporate banking facilities. Against a background of rapid change and increased competition within financial services, the Alliance & Leicester Group has successfully met the challenges faced by the industry and they are demonstrated this by: o announcing record profits following the business flotation and creating strong shareholder value. o developing innovative products including the first money-back credit card and the recently launched free energy mortgage. o diversifying activities across a broad range of businesses; in 1997 38% of operating profit was generated from areas other than the traditional mortgage lending and retail investments. o ensuring Girobank maintains its market leading position in cash and cheque handling for the retail sector. o reviewing our structures and processes, clearly focusing our operations on sales and customer service. o establishing a clear market presence through strong branding. o developing successful call centre operations, servicing all aspects of our personal and corporate customers' needs. This provides only a snapshot of their achievements and as a Group they are determined to continue with the success and growth.

I believe that these achievements are attributable to the following key factors: o development of a progressive Company culture based on teamwork, staff participation and open communication. o flexible, skilled and professional staff who can rise to a challenge. o strong and dynamic leadership; o active investment in new technology. o a clear organisational structure where responsibility and accountability is allocated to the staff. Alliance and Leicester are organised into the following business sectors. Mortgage Lending & Investments This business sector is responsible for the Group's mortgage lending and retail savings operations via state of the art call centres and branch network together with related businesses such as general insurance, life assurance and unit trusts. The Alliance & Leicester General Insurance subsidiary was launched in August 1997. Personal Banking This sector represents personal current accounts, credit and debit cards and unsecured lending activities. The unsecured loan business is a very successful part of the Group and during 1997, the value of this business increased by 36%.

Commercial Banking This involves the provision of a range of services principally to retailers, local authorities and utilities, including cash and cheque handling, bill payments, asset finance including leasing, merchant acquisition and commercial lending. Treasury & Group This business sector comprises the Group's treasury subsidiary, Alliance & Leicester Group Treasury plc. This operation manages the wholesale funding and liquidity of the Group and provide a treasury service to the Group and its customers. Core Competencies Those functions or practices deemed by a company as central to its existence. Those activities that the company believes it does best, should focus on and that are in the company's best interest for long-term success and growth Alliance & Leicester remains determined to manage its mortgage business to generate shareholder value, by ensuring that it's pricing, while competitive, is at profitable levels. They will continue to focus on improving its cost performance in this business so that profitable products can be offered.

The banking group is also structuring its administrative operations so that common processes can be delivered from efficient centres of expertise across the range of its retail banking products. This re-engineering of its business will lead to more efficient processes and improved customer service. In addition, Alliance & Leicester is developing its channel integration strategy to enable customers to do business with Alliance & Leicester in the ways they want to, not by imposing a single solution on them. Alliance & Leicester's Girobank future growth is continuing to build on its core competencies in cash transmission, and by developing the range of its services for corporate customers. Alliance & Leicester Group Treasury is developing a plan, and it expects to see further controlled growth in the Treasury contribution earnings in the year ahead. Business volumes and profits have increased in key product areas and Alliance & Leicester maintained downward pressure on cost, leading to a further significant fall in its cost: income ratio.

Project CUBA improved the way that the infrastructure is managed and supported. "We have been able to reduce risk, improve service availability, reduce the time to fix problems and achieve sustainable ongoing cost-reductions", states Peter Wheat croft, Director of Technology Services, Alliance & Leicester. The company introduced a company -wide training programme called Valuing Individual People, including a two-day course called Delivering Service Excellence. "We talked about the company's strategy, what it meant and practical tools in how to support customers", says Paul Wildes, head of HR service delivery.

"That training cost us about lb 4.3 m". Several schemes were specifically introduced to improve customer focus. "The first is Customer Service Champions, when people nominate colleagues who are constantly providing an excellent service", continues Wildes. Each quarter, four employees are sent to Disneyland Paris or Walt Disney World in Florida for a week, where they receive training in customer service skills. "It gives people a different perspective and a reward", says Wildes. The company also runs more widespread, small-scale awards called Gems - Going the Extra Mile.

The award might take the form of a bottle of champagne, for example. "It's about giving people recognition", says Wildes. "It is low cost, but it encourages people to adopt the right behaviour, and that recognition of the manager saying thank you is very powerful". Recently, the company has extended its bonus scheme so that it is not only linked to sales, but also to customer service as well. In order to really hammer home the concept of customer service, Alliance & Leicester asks employees to take note of how people in other organisations and professions operate.

"We have given staff introduction cards to pass on to people who are excellent at service. It makes people think about what differentiates in terms of excellence. It also saves us recruitment costs and because there is a payment of up to lb 750 for the introduced, it gives employees extra money", says Wildes. Key points - Project CUBA - Channel integration strategy - Rolled out a lb 4.3 m training package across the whole workforce, including a programme called Delivering Service Excellence Customer Service Champions - an award and extra training for customer-focused employees - Gems - smaller awards for employees providing good customer services Competitive Advantage - An advantage a business has over its competitors because of the quality or superiority of products or services which will persuade customers to buy from them rather than from competitors. "Most lenders have used technology simply to speed up the front-end decision. Alliance &Leicester's online mortgage application system has speeded up the whole mortgage application process, providing quicker decisions, faster processing, easy tracking of cases and less paperwork.

It is the best system in the market place, and intends to keep it ahead of its competitors". A&L main competitors are; o Abbey National o HSBC o Barclays o Lloyds TSB o Nationwide o First Direct o Natwest o Halifax Alliance & Leicester (A&L) has embraced a huge, multi-dimensional change programme intended to transform it into the most customer-focused financial services provider in the UK. The programme encompasses a rigorous simplification of A&L's business and the deployment of a technical architecture to underpin a total customer management capability. The programme will boost A&L's competitive advantage and enhance shareholder value. In the aggressive UK financial services market place A&L wanted to develop and deliver a strategy for change that would exploit its core capabilities and ensure a strong independent future. The bank selected KPMG Consulting to design, develop and implement an integrated programme of change to transform all areas of the organisation.

The integrated business and technology programme needed to leverage A&L's customer relationships, deliver challenging financial targets on revenue growth, and achieve a lb 100 million reduction in costs over a three year period. KPMG Consulting resources have been deployed across three key areas: programme management; delivery of an integrated business and IT architecture; and cost management. Programme management KPMG Consulting has supported A&L in setting up a robust programme governance and management structure. This structure ensures that a programme of integrated projects, currently numbering around 80, is appropriately managed across the organisation and that key stakeholders are adequately involved in decision-making processes. The roll-out of KPMG Consulting's programme and project management methodologies has helped to manage delivery risks. As part of the programme a review of A&L's existing projects was carried out and all those deemed non-essential were cancelled.

Integrated architecture Turning the strategy into reality has involved the design and development of an integrated, medium-term, business and IT target model. This model identified the key developments needed to deliver the new customer management-based architecture. A&L wanted this architecture to include: the development of an operational single view of the customer; the delivery of a common set of processes and logic in a sophisticated middleware solution; the integration of all channels and products with consistent information; and enhanced sales and servicing functionality. A phased approach was developed to turn the technical and business architecture into a series of releases aligned to business priorities.

The delivery of the new integrated business and technical infrastructure has brought A&L a range of business benefits, including multi-channel servicing capability and increased self-service capability. Cost management A major cost management exercise analysed the cost profile of non-customer-facing functions right across the A&L Group. Through robust processes based on appropriate benchmarking comparisons, the KPMG Consulting team has helped A&L to achieve significant cost reductions in the short-term and has identified medium-term opportunities for further efficiencies. The cost management work stream has also successfully identified savings of tens of millions of pounds. The benefits A&L's ongoing change programme is fundamental to the company achieving its short-, medium- and long-term financial targets around income growth and cost reduction. It has focused the organisation on initiatives that deliver most value and make best use of scarce resources in key areas such as IT.

The change programme has allowed the organisation to enhance the A&L customer experience, improve customer retention rates, increase cross-sales and reduce costs. Distinctive capabilities These capabilities have been termed "distinctive competencies" and generally refer to the unique skills and activities that a firm can do better than rival firms. (Selznick, 1957; Lado, Boyd and Wright, 1992). Moreover, these are the distinctive capabilities that support a market position that is valuable and difficult to imitate. The best test of the distinctiveness of a capability is whether it disproportionately facilitates the provision of superior customer value or permits the business to deliver to customers in an appreciably more cost-effective way.

In this respect, a distinctive capability functions much like a key success factor. Alliance & Leicester' CEO argued that the power of the groups brand is an important strength on which to build future business. He added that there is clear evidence from independent market research that awareness of the Alliance & Leicester brand is higher than for number of its large competitors, as is the number of potential customer who considers Alliance & Leicester as potential provider of financial services for their own needs. Alliance and Leicester Aims The Alliance & Leicester Group's vision is to deliver value to our shareholders by becoming the UK's most customer focused financial services organisation - bar none. Customers & their reputation o A&L's reputation as a secure, customer focused financial services institution is based upon prudent management of their assets and the provision of a range of products and services which meet customers' needs and offer value for money. o Earning and retaining the trust and confidence of customers must be a high priority for A&L as they believe this is essential for providing and sustaining long term profitable relationships with them. o A&L aim to provide the highest standards of customer service treating each customer as an individual. Complaints will be resolved as expeditiously as possible and they will seek to learn from their mistakes. o The information they give to customers is clear and readily understandable form. o A&L will not risk the Group's reputation by knowingly associating with people or organisations or products or transactions which could potentially damage that reputation. o A&L are positive about complying with legal and regulatory obligations - this protects their customers, shareholders and themselves.

Three have become one! Alliance & Leicester Business Banking, Girobank & Sovereign Finance have come together under one brand. This means that customers will have access to an experienced team of business specialists - and a complete range of business finance services. About Alliance and Leicester Alliance & Leicester is one of the UK's major financial services groups.

It offers a broad range of financial services to personal, commercial and small business customers. Alliance & Leicester has been a member of the FTSE 100 index of leading shares since converting from its original mutual building society status in 1997. Internet Share Dealing Their Internet Share Dealing Service, provided by Barclays Stockbrokers, is a nominee share dealing service. You can use this service to buy and sell shares during market hours, on the London Stock Exchange. This service offers: o Low dealing fees o Online registration o Nominee service o Real-time quotes o Automatic online stock switching facility o A safe, secure online trading system o Settlement in 3 business days Telephone Share Dealing The Alliance & Leicester Telephone Share Dealing Service is also provided by Barclays Stockbrokers.

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