Case Study

ABN AMRO (B): The challenge of scaling self-organization

4 pages
February 2025
Reference: IMD-7-2439

The B case picks up at the end of Case A. It’s now autumn 2022. Klaas Ariaans and Eric Jones, leaders within ABN AMRO’s Personal and Business Banking Division had been reflecting on the success of self-organization in their divisions. This new working method gave branches and banking teams more autonomy over how, when and where they worked, as well as how they could best serve their local customers. It had also improved employee attraction and retention. Video banking and self-organization enabled the division to find a balance between digital self-service and personal contact for complex products such as mortgages. The result was a 57% increase in the division’s transactional NPS score. Yet, although Ariaans and Jones had achieved considerable success, their ambition to expand self-organization to other parts of ABN AMRO had not yet been realized. The case explores the different strategies and initiatives they attempted and what happened. Their resolve was unchanged, however, and the case ends with a question: How could they set a path for the rest of the bank to enjoy similar success?

Learning Objective
  • Understand the strategic and leadership initiatives needed to influence and engage other parts of a business when implementing new ways of working
Keywords
Digital, Digital Transformation, Culture, Self-organization, Scaling
Settings
Europe, Netherlands
ABN AMRO, Finance and Insurance, Banking
2020
Type
Field Research
Copyright
© 2025
Available Languages
English
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