Success lessons, Jean-Luc Martino, CIO, Raiffeisen Banque, winner of the 2015 European CIO of the Year Award

Quoted from Digital Leadership Report (see for more info)

Jean-Luc Martino, CIO of Banque Raiffeisen

Category: Small and Medium Enterprise

Activity: Banking

Turnover (EUR): 0,15 B

Employees (FTE): 600

About the IT division

Full Time Equivalents: 46

% of Total IT Budget from last year spent on

Operations and Maintenance: 39%

New Application Development: 61%

A selection of recent accomplishments

When Martino started at Raiffeisen in 2012 IT was hardly involved in any corporate decision or strategy. In 2 years time Martino managed to change this profoundly through a number of high-profile projects:

1. migration in one go of the whole banking activity on a new core banking system;
2. 100% availability and reliability achieved since go live for the +100,000 electronic operations per day;
3. introduction of lean practices in IT and strong internal SLA's, aiming at getting IT partnering with business;
4. relocation of the headquarter with 300 people, including the datacenter; and
5. reshaping the e-Banking end-user experience. This resulted in additional sales, an increase in customer satisfaction of the bank (confirmed by the Luxembourg banking satisfaction yearly survey) and major cost savings.

Launched a mobile banking app in 5 months time, used by 3.500 customers after 10 months. This resulted in substantial cost reduction in development due to strong integration with back-end infrastructure and streamlining development between mobile and desktop applications.

Supported the launch of a new fidelity program for Raiffeisen shareholders rewarded with commercial advantages according to their banking business volumes.

A selection of key lessons and advice

Involve operations early in the development process. Often the development and operations teams have separated workstreams. Martino quickly realized the benefit of having the operation team involved in the early stages of a development process. Building a bridge between development and operations helps to ensure a smooth rollout of new projects.

Use governance to develop a single coherent voice. At Raiffeisen IT was historically spread among different business workstreams. The IT goverance practices were hence driven by the business. For Martino to be successful it was vital to have IT integrated again and develop a single voice in IT governance.

Keep it simple and always try to demystify complex business requirements !

Quote

"IT mission statement is to enable business by delivering efficient solutions and also helping the Business to develop a vision and to innovate. Being at the intersection of Human, Process and Technology, CIOs have an utmost exciting job!"

See Journal: NYC, Pennsylvania, Geneva, Brussels - CIO CITY, Amsterdam, Paris