Accenture Strategy and Attijariwafa on Accelerating Trust in Banking – Internal, Suppliers and Customers

Coming on top of a very difficult and complex existing situation, Covid-19 has put additional pressure on profitability and capital requirements in the banking sector in the European Union and Africa, with drops in revenue in the order of 35-45% and the lowest return on equity since the aftermath of the great crash of 2008. Banks were already having to deal with a whole raft of major challenges including a shift in customer expectations towards “everything digital”, a technological revolution, disruptive competition, the shift to new value networks and channels, continuing regulatory demands and consumer pressures around issues such as sustainability and ethical investment.

José Carande, Managing Director, Accenture Strategy, explained some of the difficulties and challenges faced by banks and financial services companies at a JAGGAER webinar on October 8, 2020. He was joined by Youness Taghrichte, Head of Procurement at Attijariwafa Bank, together with Richard Hogg, VP Northern Europe, JAGGAER, and Javier Lopez, Senior Value Engineer, JAGGAER.

You can view a full recording of the webinar here.

“Optimizing cost, in the order of a 20-25% reduction on the current situation, is therefore a must in order to survive. At the same time banks have to invest in new technology to ‘reinvent the industry’, ”Carande said. “Spend management and procurement will play a key role in enabling banks to achieve their efficiency targets while managing supply chain risks,” he added.

Carande highlighted six key focus areas for procurement in financial services: closer partnership with internal customers using agile implementation methods, managing the new wave of automation, leveraging reliable spend data, for example to manage category strategy, collaborating more effectively with suppliers, for example to Achieve sourcing win-wins, risk management across the entire supply chain and a broader technology stack covering the full procurement spectrum from source to pay.

In our poll, webinar participants saw business partnering, supplier innovation and collaboration, and supply chain risk management as their key areas of focus for procurement.

A case study presentation by Youness Taghrichte provided a good example of how JAGGAER customers in the financial services sector are tackling these issues. Attijariwafa Bank has successfully implemented a source-to-contract solution with the JAGGAER ONE platform. Taghrichte reported that JAGGAER had enabled it to maintain continuity of service throughout the pandemic while efficiently sourcing protective equipment for its staff at short notice.

Attijariwafa Bankis the largest bank in Morocco and the seventh largest on the African continent, and with 4,930 branches mainly focused on retail banking, Africa’s largest branch network. It has subsidiaries in Europe and in Egypt. The procurement team consists of 40 buyers, around half of them based in the bank’s Casablanca headquarters. Their annual spend is approximately $ 400 million, with the biggest shares split between the IT, services and facilities management categories and 4,000 vendors worldwide, the majority based in Morocco. The team has an annual target of achieving $ 20 million savings year on year.

For me, the biggest benefits of JAGGAER so far have been the ability to ensure continuity of service through the crisis, together with the speed with which we could meet exceptional demands such as the provision of facemasks, hand sanitizer and protective equipment to our colleagues on time, without any delays and without any need for paper-based approvals and signatures.

Youness Taghrichte, Head of Procurement, Attjariwafa Bank

Before implementing JAGGAER, Attjariwafa had a paper-based and manual approach to issuing RFPs and RFQs, which were then received in sealed envelopes. Purchase orders were issued through the ERP system, but with no link to the approvals workflow and procurement decisions. Moreover, the bank lacked any collaborative supplier relationship management or sourcing tool. Sourcing relied on web searches and records kept in Excel or on paper, which meant there was no comprehensive data on spend. “This situation was becoming untenable, not least with the growing regulatory compliance burden and GDPR in particular,” according to Taghrichte, who has been with Attijariwafa Bank since 2005, having previously gained experience in procurement with Procter & Gamble.

Attijariwafa’s senior leadership asked Taghrichte to put together a business case for the implementation of an electronic procurement solution. “This was a difficult task as you cannot quantify return on investment in terms of revenue growth from such a project. But we set out four objectives that would drive benefits: the dematerialization of the complete end-to-end process from expression of need to contract; implementation of interfaces to ensure continuity between sourcing and purchasing; a 360 ^o view of all suppliers from qualification (KYS), with reliable management of their administrative records and performance (SRM); and a reporting function providing a strategic and multidimensional view of purchasing activity, ”Taghrichte said.

By spring 2019 Attijariwafa had implemented a source-to-contract solution with JAGGAER, aiming to achieve maximum automation, best practices in process simplification and enhanced agility for all buyers.

“Like everyone else, we were unprepared for the pandemic, but the decision to implement a cloud-based sourcing solution and its successful rollout made it very easy for us to connect remotely from our homes, starting on day one of the lockdown, without any interruption to the sourcing and procurement process, ”Taghrichte said. “For me, the biggest benefits of JAGGAER so far have been the ability to ensure continuity of service through the crisis, together with the speed with which we could meet exceptional demands such as the provision of facemasks, hand sanitizer and protective equipment to our colleagues on time, without any delays and without any need for paper-based approvals and signatures, ”he added.

Attijariwafa has also reported a variety of longer-term benefits of the implementation, including a 10% reduction in time spent on the RFQ process as a result of automation, and an improvement in data quality (100% accuracy on data relating to vendors, pricing and contracts) and availability (the data is now centrally managed). Having visibility over spend data has provided a basis for achieving savings. To date, Attijariwafa has achieved an average five percent saving on B and C category spend. Vendor self-service has further saved time, while greater transparency into vendor ownership, finances and where they operate, has enabled better risk monitoring. “Finally, by having contracts in the system and alerts when it is time for renewals, we are avoiding costs by renegotiating on a regular basis,” Taghrichte said.

He emphasized that frequent and comprehensive communication, including newsletters outlining the progress towards the go-live, was of critical importance to the successful implementation of the solution. Attijariwafa also trained all users (buyers, authorizers etc.) in the system and updated key stakeholders (eg internal auditors) on the new procedures. Following the successful implementation and the proven benefits, management has now asked Taghrichte to extend the system to subsidiaries in 2021.

Richard Hogg, Vice President JAGGAER Northern Europe, said that business continuity and supplier risk had become major challenges across multiple sectors during the Covid-19 pandemic. “With their textbook approach to change management and successful implementation of the JAGGAER platform, Youness Taghrichte and the procurement team at Attijariwafa Bank have shown how to leverage technology to overcome these challenges,” Hogg said.