2006-06-14
Dutch-South African partnership delivers SA expertise to Dutch bank
Dutch banking customers now
have free access to powerful personal financial planning tools online, thanks
to a fertile partnership between Cape Town-based Jam Warehouse and Dutch
company Yellowtail.
Jam Warehouse has just
completed an innovative web-based savings calculator for Rabobank, one of the
largest banks in The Netherlands. The tool helps the bank’s customers decide
how much to save and over what period, depending on their personal profile and
goals.
“It’s quite common in The
Netherlands for people to take sabbaticals from work, for anything from a few
weeks to a few months,” explains Jam Warehouse MD John Thorne. “Financial
planning for those breaks, and for retirement, is subject to many regulations.
Some recent changes to the regulations meant banks had to offer more
information and more flexible products. Rabobank’s new calculator is a response
to those changes.”
Richard Dorman, the Jam
Warehouse lead developer responsible for the tool, notes that it provides a
deceptively simple user experience. “It will suggest quite different options
depending on your income, your age, your appetite for risk, how much time you
want to take off, and so on, so there are some quite complex rules behind it.
It’s very calculation-intensive.”
Rabobank also needed the
savings calculator to be fast, and to cope with expected high usage. “It was an
interesting design challenge,” says Dorman. “Rabobank have a reputation for
very good electronic solutions, so they wanted a tool that was small, effective
and fast. The technical requirements were quite exacting, so we opted for very
flexible technology that enabled us to meet all their goals.”
The tool was delivered on
time with no errors, enabling Rabobank to meet its goal of being first to
market with products based on the new regulations.
“There were some challenges
working in the Dutch language,” says Thorne, “and our partners at Yellowtail
were very important in helping us to meet those. They are Dutch but lived and
worked in Cape Town
for several years, so they’re ideally placed to act as intermediaries.”
Yellowtail and Jam Warehouse are working together on several projects for the
Dutch market.
