The Trust Company is making headway with its strategic plans as the rebuilding of its business systems commence, according to its chief executive.
“We are building a very strong and vibrant market position across the three countries of Australia, New Zealand and Singapore,” Trust Company chief executive John Atkin told InvestorDaily.
“We’re now getting real momentum on the execution of our strategy.”
The company announced in April that it would commence a three-year initiative worth $10 million to upgrade its business systems to support its customer-focused management platform.
The upgrade of systems and processes, particularly for its personal client services business, wouldl be a critical enabler for the transformation and growth of the company, Atkin said.
“We’re literally mid-stream in the testing of the three vendors we’re working with,” he said.
“We have an opportunity to really lift the quality, service and experience of the client. Putting their affairs online so they’ve got access will make it more in line with their expectations and, at the same time, it will enable us to take a lot of risk out of the business and be more efficient.”
Three elements of the initiative will be deployed in the initial stage, but no timeframe has been set.
“It’s no accident that we chose the investment management platform, the Trust account administration and the client relationship management system,” Atkin said.
“In terms of lifting client experience and improving the quality of service to them, we thought those three are essential.”
The Trust Company will then shift its focus to improving its internal business processes, such as document management and generation.
“The disciplines a good firm needs to have to track its work, work flow and then linking that through [on the system], I suspect we’ll get this underway and then the rest will follow as a suite thereafter,” Atkin said.
Furthermore, a client contact program had been implemented in the business, as a key strategy of the company was growth through client advocacy, he said.
“We do that informally at the moment, but [we’re] making that a formal part of the process and getting regular client satisfaction survey results done,” he said.
In addition, the company’s staff incentives program would be simplified, he said.
“We have already got a broad incentive scheme with our staff, but the feedback we’ve got is that it’s too complex so we’re trying to make it simpler, but I’d still call it a balanced scorecard,” he said.
“It will reward team behaviours and good client service and when we can get the client survey statistics feeding in, it will be even more powerful.”
The Trust Company presented its 2012 annual general meeting to its shareholders yesterday.
