Fast-growing institutions experience more of everything — projects, stakeholders, requirements, locations, and compliance checks — yet successfully addressing the needs of additional people, places, and things can be challenging. As Kiwibank expanded across New Zealand, the bank sought to overcome efficiency obstacles by streamlining and automating traditional processes.

Kiwibank deployed Adobe Workfront to standardize marketing asset and project management as well as reporting and approvals — all of which are leading to better communication, project visibility, compliance, and asset accessibility.

Kiwibank’s core businesses are personal banking (e.g., home loans, personal loans, credit cards, savings accounts, etc.), business banking (e.g., lending, investments, merchant services, insurance, etc.), and wealth services. Headquartered in Wellington, the bank has more than 2,000 employees and 150 branches across New Zealand.

The challenge

Kiwibank project communication and collaboration were disconnected across marketing team members, agency partners, and stakeholders responsible for advertising, communications, and campaigns for Kiwibank’s traditional customers.

Inconsistent project tracking and reporting

Without a centralized system, the bank had difficulty tracking projects. Staff members kept information in their heads or relied on different spreadsheets and documents to track their work. Communication was primarily through email, which meant not everyone had all project details at their fingertips when they needed them. The marketing team knew it needed a better way to bring information together and gain consistency in how it tracked workflows and reported on in-progress work.

“We had a very inconsistent approach to taking on new work,” remembers Vesna Nixon, Head of Marketing Campaigns at Kiwibank. “Stakeholder requests were scattered. Some came through emails, others through emails with a creative brief, and still others were five-minute conversations at someone’s desk that stakeholders thought were equivalent to project briefs. Without consistent information up front, we ended up wasting time chasing down important details.”

Consistent reporting also presented challenges for Kiwibank. The bank regularly engages with outside creative and design agencies to help fulfill the volume of work requests coming into the 20-person marketing team. Internal marketers had their own ways of tracking and reporting on tasks while agency staff had different work-in-progress reports. This made it difficult for anyone to have complete visibility over all of the projects on the go.

Costly asset retrieval

Each agency used to store final collateral files on behalf of the bank because Kiwibank lacked a centralized system to house them. Every time the bank needed to modify a piece of collateral in an agency’s possession, the bank had to pay a one-time account management and retrieval fee of approximately $195. During a typical month, the bank retrieved approximately 30 of these business-as-usual pieces at a total cost of approximately $5,700 per month — a yearly estimated cost of more than $68,000.

“We were asked to consider how we could reduce our business-as-usual costs, and we believed one significant way was to increase our digital capabilities,” explains Nixon. “By having everything in one place — projects, assets, approvals, and reporting — we could gain efficiencies and lower costs.

Manual, paper-based approval processes

Banking is a highly regulated industry. Compliance with regulations requires Kiwibank to have strict sign-off procedures. Paper-based documents have to be created, scanned, and delivered for signatures. As the bank grew and more offices opened across Auckland and Wellington, paper sign-off processes became even more challenging. Individuals who spent time away from their office frequently could delay the paper-based signing process by days. Audits were particularly frustrating if someone had left the bank without appropriately filing the approved paperwork.

“To create and complete all of the required documents was an intensive process,” says Nixon. “Additional offices with stakeholders located outside of the Wellington head office made it harder to communicate, and tracking paper-based documents back and forth could take up to five days every month.”

With the goal of improving marketing operations, Nixon began a request for proposal (RFP) process to solve key process challenges. A Kiwibank RFP outlined three primary needs — a digital asset management solution, a campaign workflow solution, and a solution to track online approvals. Of the three, the most pressing need was for an automated campaign workflow solution.

The Workfront solution

Kiwibank deployed Adobe Workfront to improve project communication and management. The bank then enhanced its work management deployment in the following year with the solution's digital proofing and digital asset management (DAM) capabilities. Today, Kiwibank’s personal banking marketing team uses Workfront to support collateral updates and new campaigns, website promotions, approval processes, archiving, and reporting.

“Workfront has made my life as a manager easier because it gives me clarity,” says Vesna Nixon, Persinal Marketing Lead at Kiwibank. “It’s also really good for stakeholders because everyone can see what everyone else is doing.”

Automated request queue and project templates

Project managers seeking new campaign materials or updates to existing assets must now make all requests through Workfront. This gives requestors, in-house marketers, and other team members more clarity about assigned work and deadlines. Internal project leads, for example, can use Workfront to assign tasks to legal and agency team members within projects so they understand what is coming. With all projects in the centralized system and a service-level agreement of 24-hour turnaround on initial request responses, Kiwibank has improved communication.

The bank has also developed a number of Workfront templates to streamline repetitive tasks by mapping every necessary step in a workflow. With all of the steps covered, team members can jumpstart projects, spending less time planning and more time building creative. When templates for campaigns that require social channels and search terms are completed, for example, Workfront improves collaboration by automatically notifying those team members about newly assigned tasks.

“I’ve been modifying our templates pretty regularly to eliminate time-consuming steps in our processes,” says Nixon. “Workfront is a new normal for us. It has taken some time for us to change campaign flow process habits, and now that we have, we are seeing some time-saving benefits in work development. We expect to see additional benefits in final sign offs and reporting, too.”

Single repository

Although Kiwibank previously stored some marketing materials on an internal hard drive, not everyone had access. Moreover, no one had access to the materials housed on agency systems. Marketing team members can now easily share access through one repository to collateral and other materials across teams and locations with the cloud-based Workfront solution.

Digital proofing

Marketers used to send paper documents to many approvers. Now that sign-off processes are automated in Workfront, Kiwibank is more efficient. Workfront digital proofing integrates with Kiwibank’s approval workflows and keeps sign offs from getting delayed or lost. Without scanning documents or sending huge email attachments, marketers share digital proofs with approvers who can then add comments, feedback, and signatures directly in the document. Managers are free to be mobile, knowing they can digitally sign off now from anywhere, at any time.

Digital asset management

Workfront DAM is helping Kiwibank easily manage the entire life cycle of marketing work, simplifying the management, control, and publishing of marketing and creative assets. With Workfront DAM, marketers can manage and connect brand, files, and teams from one central location. This addition allows the entire workflow to be connected from beginning to end. Because Kiwibank can manage the creation and production of marketing assets in Workfront then seamlessly curate, store, and distribute final assets using Workfront DAM software, the bank’s marketing team is saving money while gaining one complete solution for all of its work.

Custom reporting

Dashboard capabilities in Workfront have enabled Kiwibank to replace manual, disconnected reporting processes with real-time reports. Managers and general managers can quickly get accurate, up-to-date details about the status of every project. Agency teams can also simply run their own custom reports without complex programming or tools, showing completed and in-process projects.

Benefits

Kiwibank deployed the new technologies in three phases to achieve the following benefits:

• Complete visibility through the Workfront The solution quickly helped Kiwibank streamline its marketing request, review, approval, and reporting processes. By standardizing processes in Workfront, Kiwibank has more clarity into work and can allocate tasks or reassign them based on workloads. Stakeholders no longer have to chase down marketers to understand where their work is and managers can quickly view dashboards showing the status of all projects. Nixon says: “Workfront has definitely improved how we work across the bank by providing clarity into all projects.”
• Improved efficiency using Workfront digital proofing The digital proofing capabilities in Workfront speed requests and help with compliance by creating an audit trail with date and time stamps for every action. “This will be gold for us,” says Nixon. “I expect digital proofing to save at least an hour just in the time it was taking for us to compile PDFs, distribute them, collate changes, and rescan documents for final signature.”
• Greater asset control and lower costs with Workfront DAM Kiwibank expects to reduce risk and increase asset accessibility using Workfront DAM. The DAM should also help the marketing team reduce future costs because it will no longer have to pay fees — an estimated $68,000 a year — to move assets between former and new agencies. “Instead of having our assets all over Wellington, we can control everything in the DAM," says Nixon. "We can tag assets the way we want to tag them and simply send a link straight from the DAM to a studio for small design changes.”

“Now that we have completed all of the training, we are really looking forward to having everything automated and shared in Workfront,” concludes Nixon.

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