Mr. Lankhoorn, Manager of ABN AMRO Media Shop Amsterdam

About ABN AMRO
ABN AMRO is a prominent international bank, headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Its origin dates back to 1824.

The company ranks 11th in Europe and 23rd in the world based on tier 1 capital, with over 3,000 branches in more than 60 countries, a staff of over 100,000 full-time equivalents and total assets of EUR 601 billion. ABN AMRO is listed on the Euronext, London and New York stock exchanges.

The goal of ABN AMRO is to create value for its clients. Key in its relationship approach is a constant focus on the financial services needs of their client segments. ABN AMRO is active in three principal customer segments:

Excellence of service to clients and leadership in the chosen markets are of paramount importance to ABN AMRO’s long-term success.

 

Media Shops in the Netherlands
In the Netherlands local offices are supported in their document needs by so-called Media Shops, which are located at several main banking offices in the Netherlands. The Media Shops deliver all kind of document services, amongst others: creative document design (DTP), document production in black-andwhite and full colour including tab-based
training materials, full colour poster production, and CD-ROM production and printing. There is no obligation for the local offices to order from the internal Media Shops only. When they want they could go directly to a commercial or third party for their needs. This creates a very healthy competitive
environment. However, the Media Shops see an increasing ordering volume from all internal customers, because they excel in customer service, speed and knowledge of the internal customer—at very competitive price levels.

 

Financial leverage for customers
Important competences inside ABN-AMRO are the so-called Private Clients & Asset Management (PCAM) departments—for individuals and institutional investors. These financial investment specialists create complex financial products to improve return on investment for their customers. All kinds of
investor meetings and workshops are being organised by these specialists for their customers, to teach them the specifics of these products. A brochure explaining the product is in itself often not enough to convince customers of the benefits of the product.

 

Choice for digital colour
Earlier letters with offset printed brochures were used to invite customers to these financial services meetings. Disadvantage of this approach was that the offset brochures were frequently changing and the letter on company paper was obviously not appealing enough to convince customers to attend the meeting. Furthermore, with offset printing a lot of waste was produced. Therefore it was decided to go to digital colour printing, to make a fully personalised invitation possible. Another advantage of this approach is that even on the very last moment the meeting programmes can be changed and individualised.

 

Colour system requirements
ABN AMRO had a clear view as for what the new colour production system should be capable of.

Colour consistency

To communicate powerfully with corporate colours, ABN AMRO needed a print technology with very high colour consistency. Most colour printing systems on the market have to be calibrated every morning for colour consistency during the day. The probability of this not happening is quite high, because it takes too much time or is being forgotten.

Media handling
Another important requirement was the capability of the colour device to handle all kinds of media. This would give the marketers the highest flexibility in designing the invitations on paper formats and papers they wanted. Moreover, today’s offset printers are
very flexible with print media, and the new colour system’s would have to compete with that.

Reliability
Furthermore a new colour system would have to be very reliable, since the turnaround time in producing the invitations are very short, sometimes even only two or three days. Loss of production capacity would make these service levels impossible.

Ease of use
Last but not least the system had to be easy to use for the operators. To create personalised invitations, software to handle variable data is needed.

 

The variable colour solution
To deal with the colour printing related requirements, ABN AMRO has chosen for an Océ CPS700 colour production system. For the variable data part ABN AMRO choose for PrintShop Mail. Developed by ATLAS, one of Océ’s partners, PrintShop Mail is a professional software tool that optimises the process of merging variable database information with any PDF based design. It is fast, efficient and very easy to use.

Satisfied
Mr. Lankhoorn, Manager of ABN AMRO Media Shop Amsterdam, is satisfied with the Océ solution: ‘The new colour solution proves to be very effective. A good indicator is the number of full colour prints produced on the system—more than 70,000 prints every month!’