The Association of Foreign Banks (AFB) has recently gone live with oomi CRM and associated modules as part of a major technology refresh project at the trade association.
Established in 1947, the AFB is the voice of Foreign Banks in the UK. The AFB champions the success of foreign banks in the UK by supporting their establishment; providing a platform for them to share information and best practice; promoting their interests to industry stakeholders, policymakers and regulators; and supporting a positive profile of the sector in the media. The AFB today has around 200 international banking group members, representing about 80% of the UK’s foreign banking market.
With an ambitious new AFB Strategy agreed in 2019 by the Board, it was clear that the AFB’s previous systems were no longer fit for purpose and a refresh was required to improve the efficiency of membership management and processes, as well as improving the services and communications to these members and stakeholders.
As Amy Swain, Director of Member and Stakeholder Engagement at the AFB explains: “We are a relatively small organisation and we had a lot of staff spending too much time on routine administration tasks, such as sending invoices. We needed to free up their time so they could spend more time supporting our members. Investing in oomi CRM was all about efficiency gains for us. We wanted a system that was integrated and automated, that’s why we looked at not only oomi CRM but our finance and web systems too.”
oomi are supporting a comprehensive technological refresh at the AFB. As well as investing in the core oomi CRM modules to manage membership and events, the AFB is also using modules to support finance and committees management, and to integrate with Outlook and Mailchimp. The AFB is also using oomi to deliver a web portal for its members as an integral part of a new website, developed by agency SpinDogs.
The technology upgrade also involved their finance system, with a successful migration from an outdated Quickbooks system to cloud-based Xero. This was provided by Vertis Accounting, and included integration with the oomi CRM and the Stripe payment system.
“We now don’t need to rely on one person to get critical information now – anyone can go in and get the information they need. And we have been able to redeploy people to other tasks, for example finance people taking on membership activities. Again, making us much more efficient,” said Swain.
Joel Trotman, oomi Director of Sales, added: “We are delighted to welcome AFB as an oomi CRM user. Yet again, a membership body has seen how flexible and user-friendly oomi CRM is, enabling users to get up and running very quickly and facilitating easy integration with other key applications such as the website and finance.”