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The two-year T&T program that kicked off in December 2017 was massive in its scope. “We are talking about the full outsourcing of the IT resources to our partner Fujitsu,” says Bakkebø. “Help desk, end user services, desktop managed services, security services, data center services and network services for an end user group of around 10,000 now, in 40 sites across 24 European countries, including the hosting and management of around 1,300 application and database servers.“
Among other moves, it meant Fujitsu taking over Intrum Justitia’s data center in Schiphol, Netherlands with the aim of migrating what was a largely legacy environment to new data centers set up in Germany and Finland.
Bumps in the road
The two-year program is now in its final months but a transition on such a scale was not without its major challenges.
“Of course it’s always a bumpy road with these kinds of projects. But we are now very close to having the internal state that we were aiming for, where we have a set-up that is much easier to scale up and scale down — one that makes it much easier for us to onboarding [other new companies] when we have M&As,” says Bakkebø.
Aside from the infrastructure upheaval, she points to the cultural shift that the centralization and standardization have been required within many areas of the company. Intrum Justitia users and people dealing with the Schiphol data center, for example, were much more accustomed to having on-site service capabilities.
“There are change management challenges when you no longer have a guy on site to log tickets with or a local expert who knows the details of your customized application,” she says. “In all process changes, you should never underestimate the effort and time needed to transform people’s thinking and way of working.”
Parallel thinking
The shift to a more streamlined model for internal services in many ways echoes the external focus that Intrum has on ensuring its customer-facing channels are now increasingly digital, mobile and automated. “Our clients expect effective channels, so why should we behave any differently internally?” says Bakkebø.
Intrum is putting in place portals and automated systems for its customers who are making debt repayments or seeking support, it is reducing the need for a direct interaction with call center agents — in 2019, Intrum employed 3,500 such agents. “It seems natural that we are going through the same journey [of automation and self-service] with our internal services,” says Bakkebø.
As the two-year transformation comes to a conclusion, Intrum now wants to standardize higher up the IT stack. “With the infrastructure part in place, we are now open to take the next step: looking at the application layer and seeing what we can do there to consolidate and standardize.”
Intrum already rolls out a set of standard applications to all its European subsidiaries but it also maintains an application development team of around 300 based in Riga, Latvia. The regulatory environments for debt collection and purchasing differ subtly around Europe, so there will always be a need for some customization of applications, she points out. “But we’re looking to standardize as much as possible.”
Notably, Intrum has kicked off a major program to explore how it could bring more consistency to the processes used within Europe-wide collection systems. “The priority is to harmonize processes and ways of working in different countries so we can optimize operational efficiency and benefit from our size and scale,” highlights Bakkebø. But rather than implement a new debt collection approach in a ‘big-bang’ move, the aim is to scale out the change process by process.
Future ambitions
That will allow Intrum to accelerate and widen its application of customer interaction technologies such as robotic process automation, chatbots, data analytics and AI. “The difficulty has been the fact that we don’t [yet] have harmonized processes between countries. But all of this will be taken into this new debt collection program,” says Bakkebø.
There are also clear ambitions to utilize more cloud services and strengthen the hybrid set up that the company has today. “We have a hybrid set up today. We are migrating to Office 365 but we need to start to take the next steps, moving more of our data and application systems in the cloud,” she says. But for the foreseeable future there will continue to be clients and regulatory environments that demand an on-premise set-up.
All this activity signals that Intrum has put in place a foundation to support wider ambitions. As the company recently said: “2019 was an eventful year with the realization of the final cost synergies stemming from the 2017 merger… and revenues up 19% to SEK16.0 billion [$1.63bn]” — an observation that Bakkebø modestly sums up with “We’re not there yet — but we’re getting there.”
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