The French Banking Federation (FBF) is a professional organization representing all banks operating in France. Its mission is to promote banking and financial activity in the French, European and international arenas, and to define the positions and proposals of the profession vis-à-vis the government and authorities of the economic and financial field. In response to the global economic crisis, the organization has played a pivotal role in the reformation of the French banking system, defining the industry’s position on policy reform and revising banking policies and lending guidelines in response to regulatory changes such as the Consumer Lending Act and Banking and Financial Regulation Act.

Document Chaos

In 2008, as instability in the US banking system spread overseas, the number of policy and positioning documents and guidelines handled by the organization doubled. These documents have a significant on the financial health of the French banking industry and beyond, and employees need to update them frequently in response to political, social, and economic changes. Updates need to be made quickly and be fully documented; however, emailing documents back and forth between FBF executives, member banks, subject matter experts, lawyers, and regulators is a slow process, and vital document history gets buried.

The SharePoint Adoption Gap

The FBF deployed SharePoint to streamline document collaboration, but most people ignored it. Instead, they continued to email documents back and forth, mainly because people resisted changing their work habits.

Solution

To bring everyone on board SharePoint, FBF deployed harmon.ie. The software brings SharePoint into email , enabling FBF employees to easily search, access, and share emails and documents on SharePoint from within their preferred work environment – which is email. As people continued to email attachments, harmon.ie automatically uploaded them in SharePoint and sent document links, instead. The outcome was people began using SharePoint as a matter of course, with everyone having easy access to the latest version of a document. harmon.ie replaces multi-step navigation with simple drag-and-drop functionality to access SharePoint, allowing people to easily adopt SharePoint for document collaboration and sharing emails within their familiar email environment, without having to change work habits.

Results and Benefits

• Boost employee productivity and speed document production. Today, FBF employees incorporate feedback from numerous people, in multiple steps, to produce one document per person per day.
• Thorough documentation. For easy reference, people save email correspondence alongside the documents they relate to.

"harmon.ie enables our team to collaborate more efficiently on the documents, and with a high degree of confidence they have all relevant correspondence at their fingertips."
- Federic Guinet, IT Director of the Federal Banking Federation