Meeting our clients' needs

As part of our new BCVPlus strategy, we launched several major projects to align ourselves more closely with the needs of both our individual and business customers in Vaud Canton. This includes continued improvements to our products and services.

Service quality

In order to ensure that calls from private clients are dealt with in a timely manner, our call-center advisors are available non-stop every weekday from 7:30am to 7:30pm. In 2009, they handled more than 300,000 incoming calls, including 41,000 calls for our e-banking hotline. Our call center provides essential back-up for our branches in responding to the many different kinds of enquiries we receive from our customers.

The business banking hotline we set up in 2006 continued its progress last year, as more and more small businesses and self-employed customers made use of this service. With more than 56,000 calls, our SME advisors offered customers quick, practical and efficient assistance and also provided support to our advisors in the various regions of Vaud Canton.

Internet is becoming more and more popular with our customers. More than a third of our customers use our online banking services and nearly three out of four payments are carried out online. Apart from our online banking services, we launched a free real-estate ad website in 2009, www.immobiliervaudois.ch. This site is intended to help both local people and anyone wishing to settle in Vaud to find a place to live. In the first seven months since its creation, the site received more than 117,000 visits.

Products and services

Continuing our efforts to provide effective answers to changing customer needs, we enhanced our range of products and services for individual and corporate clients in 2009.

Three recent Retail Banking initiatives illustrate these efforts. First, with customers becoming more and more concerned about protecting their savings, we promoted our Direct Savings Account as an attractive alternative to other savings products.

Second, in response to increasing environmental awareness, we launched a green renovation loan and a special “Minergie” loan. These products aim to encourage construction and renovation work that will reduce energy consumption in buildings.

Finally, we rolled out our “Preferred” banking package targeted specifically at the employees of large multinational companies based in Vaud. This package offers a range of everyday banking services and has proved popular with these companies’ human resources departments, who are the ones responsible for promoting the package within the company. Over a dozen major companies now offer this banking package to foreign employees who are relocated to the region.

In Corporate Banking, we launched the "Package Direct PME," which gives small-business clients access to a full range of simple and efficient cash management tools on attractive terms. This package, for which there is an online and a classic version, meets the needs of local SMEs and positions us favorably in relation to our competitors.

In Wealth Management, our clients continued to benefit from our “Global Advisory” approach. This approach is designed to provide clients with an all-round service that addresses the needs dictated by their personal circumstances and financial situation. In addition, we rounded off our range of management products with an investment fund that enables our clients to change their exposures to stocks and bonds according to market conditions. This product proved to be particularly well suited to the shifting market climate in 2009.