Tier-1 European Bank Unifies Client
Relationships Across 14 Markets

The Situation

A major European bank — operating across wealth management, corporate banking, and retail — had accumulated 11 separate CRM systems over 20 years of organic growth and acquisition. Relationship managers were toggling between 4 to 7 different platforms per client interaction. Client data existed in silos; a corporate client's relationship manager had no visibility of the same client's wealth management holdings or retail account status.

The business impact was significant: duplicated client onboarding, regulatory data quality failures, and relationship managers spending 38% of their day on administrative reconciliation rather than client engagement. The bank's Chief Revenue Officer had a mandate from the board: one client, one view, before the next fiscal year.

Our Approach

The engagement began with a two-week diagnostic — not of technology, but of client journeys. We shadowed relationship managers across wealth, corporate, and retail divisions in three markets. The finding was consistent: the problem wasn't data duplication. It was the absence of a shared definition of what a "client relationship" meant across divisions.

We resolved this before writing a single configuration. Working with the bank's Chief Data Officer and divisional heads, we defined a canonical client data model that respected the regulatory requirements of each market while enabling cross-divisional visibility where the client had consented.

Salesforce Financial Services Cloud was selected for its pre-built household and relationship modelling, regulatory audit trail capabilities, and native integration with the bank's existing Bloomberg and Reuters data feeds. We implemented a phased rollout — Wealth first (lowest regulatory complexity), then Corporate, then Retail — with a live integration layer built on MuleSoft connecting 6 legacy systems in parallel during the transition period.

Data Migration at Scale

The migration involved 2.3 million client records across 14 jurisdictions, each with country-specific data residency requirements. We built a custom data quality framework that ran 847 automated validation rules before any record touched Salesforce — rejecting, quarantining, and flagging 340,000 records for manual review rather than migrating corrupted data at speed.

The result was a post-migration data quality score of 94.7%, compared to an industry benchmark of 78%. The €4.2M annual cost saving came directly from eliminating the operational overhead of managing duplicate and conflicting client records across legacy systems.

Go-Live & Adoption

The go-live programme included a three-tier adoption strategy: 40 "champion" users trained six weeks pre-launch, 180 early adopters onboarded in the first two weeks, and the full 1,200-user population transitioned over four weeks. Adoption at 90 days post go-live was 94% — measured by daily active usage, not login rates.

The bank achieved its board mandate: a single client view across all divisions, in all 14 markets, delivered in 16 weeks from project start. The programme was delivered on time and 6% under the approved budget.