De Volksbank achieves IT service excellence with ServiceNow

De Volksbank personalizes financial services to deliver “banking with a human touch”
De Volksbank is an independent Dutch bank holding company with four distinctive brands, including ASN Bank, BLG Wonen, RegioBank, and SNS. The bank focuses on the Dutch market, offering simple and transparent mortgage, savings, and payment products to private individuals. De Volksbank also offers insurance, investment, and lending services through its brands and serves smaller companies in a retail manner.

Putting customers first is at the core of De Volksbank’s strategy, with a mission to deliver “banking with a human touch.” The company operates multiple brands that serve their customers in the way that best suits them, while being supported by a single back office and centralised IT organisation.

Technology is key to innovation at De Volksbank
The company’s IT organisation, which underpins De Volksbank’s business, is tasked with delivering efficient internal business operations and driving a roadmap for its core banking platform through the adoption of smart technology.

Yet inefficiencies in IT service delivery were holding back innovation internally, as Jeroen Jochems, Manager, Platform Automation Team at De Volksbank, explains, “Technology is key to innovation for the bank, but our team was facing challenges due to our outdated service management solution. There was no integration with other tools, knowledge banks were dispersed across the company, and system upgrades would take two to three months to complete. The result was highly inefficient service delivery and slow resolution for our internal customers.”

ServiceNow provides a cloud-based approach to integrate and automate service delivery
De Volksbank wanted an IT service management platform that would allow full automation of the service desk, accelerate resolution for internal customers, and free the in-house IT team to focus on application development and product innovation.

Seamless integration was key, with a cloud-based approach that would remove the maintenance and upgrade burden. According to Jeroen, ServiceNow was the clear choice following a competitive selection process, with its advanced automation and reporting functionality and an out-of-the-box IT service management system, which helped ensure a fast deployment where benefits could be realised quickly.

“ServiceNow allows us to better orchestrate the availability of services that we offer and creates a self-service approach that empowers our employees,” says Jeroen.

Working with ServiceNow partner Paphos Group, De Volksbank went live with a self-service portal, allowing its 5,000 employees to easily request items or services from the IT organisation or find information to solve an IT-related problem. De Volksbank believes in the self-reliance of its employees and the self-service portal is an important asset to help make this strategy work.

“The knowledge that was previously siloed in different parts of our IT organisation is now readily available for shared use by employees,” says Jeroen. “The self-service portal allows employees to quickly find solutions, with chat functionality on hand to help them navigate the knowledge base. Many employees work from home at different hours of the day and they are seeing great value in an always-on service.”

ServiceNow helps improve De Volksbank’s view into and ability to manage risk
ServiceNow® Incident Management and ServiceNow® Problem Management were added soon after the move to a consolidated platform, alongside ServiceNow® Change and Release Management.

The ability to develop on the Now Platform also enabled De Volksbank to build and launch a new business application focused on the incident and loss process, including aspects like data leakages, to register and report on the financial implications of an incident.

The approach to risk management has also been improved, as Jeroen explains, “We have a more comprehensive view and understanding of risk, which is critical in the highly regulated financial services sector.”

The team also gained the ability to stay in-line with the release frequency of the platform and manage upgrades in-house with a lead time maximum three weeks instead of three months.

De Volksbank improves IT agility by automating request, incident, and change management workflows
The IT organisation is also experiencing a notable shift in the way its teams work, with intelligent automation streamlining the way requests and incidents are routed and processed, freeing up their time to focus on the development of technology-led projects to support the bank’s ambition and efficiency plans.

A configuration management database (CMDB) has consolidated disparate IT management systems into a single system of record, providing the IT team with one, real-time view of all assets, how they are configured, and how they’re functioning.

De Volksbank has achieved notable increases in efficiency through automation of previously manual processes and its modern, easy-to-use single system of action. This includes a 25% improvement in efficiency from auto-assigning incidents to the most appropriate person or team in the business. Simplifying processes has achieved an additional 7.5% improvement from a reduction in change effort.

“The team enjoys the ease of use offered by the Now Platform and the reporting and monitoring is so much simpler and more insightful. We have made 24/7 monitoring obsolete by automating remediation and enabling staff to be on standby at home, which they really appreciate,” says Jeroen.

ServiceNow delivers a single source of truth to position De Volksbank for continued in-house innovation
By moving to a single system of record for IT service management, De Volksbank now manages all processes across IT using uniform information about assets, customers, and tasks.

“The Now Platform is the place where our team works. It’s a single source of truth that informs and guides our work and reports on our activity and performance,” says Jeroen.

This source of intelligence is also proving critical to developing the De Volksbank proposition processes.

“Technology is a key strategic pillar for our business and ServiceNow enables us to innovate and build custom applications for many processes,” says Jeroen. “ServiceNow has given us an ideal environment for the fast development of new applications in-house.”

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