Microsoft Office System
Customer Solution Case Study
Bank Gains Competitive Edge with a Unique
XML-Based Desktop Liquidity Solution
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Banking
Customer Profile
Based in Chicago, Illinois, LaSalle Bank
Corporation is the parent company of LaSalle
Bank N.A. and LaSalle Bank Midwest N.A.,
and a subsidiary of Netherlands-based ABN
AMRO Bank N.V. ABN AMRO has total assets
of €855.7 billion and a presence in more
than 60 countries.
Business Situation
LaSalle Bank wanted to integrate a secure,
reliable, and simple tool for customers to
accurately calculate their cash positions
using bank account data provided by its
Web-based online treasury management
service, CashPro.
Solution
LaSalle Bank created a solution that takes
advantage of the XML capabilities of
Microsoft® Office Excel® 2003 to
automatically populate cash-position
spreadsheets with live data from CashPro.
Benefits
 Improves clients’ liquidity management
 Saves clients hours a day
 Provides a unique value-added capability
 Creates a competitive edge
 Increases customer loyalty
“The basic technology behind CashPro Accelerate,
Excel 2003, is redefining our organization.… CashPro
Accelerate will increase the value in our client
relationships unlike anything we have done before.”
Milton Santiago, Senior Vice President and Head of Electronic Banking Services, LaSalle Bank
LaSalle Bank offers a competitive range of investment, commercial,
and retail banking services to clients in the United States. It wanted
to streamline an onerous business process for its commercial
clients: accurately and efficiently determining their daily cash
position. Most clients used spreadsheets to manually enter account
data provided by CashPro®, LaSalle’s online treasury management
service. LaSalle Bank took advantage of the XML capabilities of
Microsoft® Office Professional Edition 2003 to create a best
practices cash-management Microsoft Office Excel® 2003
spreadsheet that autopopulates with account data from CashPro.
For customers, the solution saves hours daily, improves accuracy,
and enables better liquidity management. The unique solution also
defines the bank as a technological leader, drives customer loyalty,
and generates new business.
Situation
Based in Chicago, Illinois, LaSalle Bank offers
a complete range of investment, commercial,
and retail banking products to clients across
the United States. Its parent company,
LaSalle Bank Corporation, has U.S.$110
billion in assets. LaSalle Bank Corporation is
a subsidiary of one of the world’s largest
banks, Netherlands-based ABN AMRO Bank
N.V., which has total assets of €855.7 billion
(U.S.$1.04 trillion).
“Both Microsoft and
LaSalle Bank listen to
customers and work
together to provide
solutions, not just
technology, that answer
our customers’ business
challenges.”
Milton Santiago, Senior Vice President and
Head of Electronic Banking Services, LaSalle
Bank
In 2005, Greenwich Associates ranked
LaSalle’s CashPro service at the top of the
Internet-banking applications it surveyed, and
the accolade points to the bank’s consistent
focus on the customer. “We like to position
ourselves as advisers to our customers,” says
John Scully, First Vice President, Electronic
Banking for LaSalle Bank. “We work with our
customers, listen to their needs, and learn
about their businesses to develop solutions
that have long-term value and will generate a
loyal relationship.”
LaSalle Bank is always looking to
differentiate itself by focusing on
partnerships and solutions. The current
economic environment—which forces bank
customers to place increased emphasis on
the role of liquidity and controlling costs—
provided an opportunity for LaSalle Bank to
improve its customer relationships. “Liquidity
is becoming more and more important,” says
Scully. “Cash management used to be
thought of as a cost center. Now our
customers are looking at their cash positions
to bring revenue into the organization by
investing funds, and trying to minimize costs
by reducing interest paid on loans.”
LaSalle Bank wanted to help its customers
more accurately calculate their cash position
to better manage liquidity. It began by asking
customers about their cash-management
challenges. What it learned confirmed the
bank’s hunch: The best approach would
be to provide a new service based on a
powerful tool universally deployed among its
customer base—the Microsoft® Office Excel®
2003 spreadsheet software.
“We saw that 100 percent of corporate
treasurers were using Excel spreadsheets to
calculate their cash positions, even if they
had already made significant investments in
treasury workstations,” says Milton Santiago,
Senior Vice President and Head of Electronic
Banking Services for LaSalle Bank. “For many
of our customers, treasury workstations are
difficult to cost-justify and often provide more
functionality than required. We heard time
and time again how inflexible treasury
workstations are and how difficult they make
accessing and manipulating data. Ultimately
the information was input into Excel. Our
clients were using PivotTable® views and
formulas in Excel; however, they were worried
about data accuracy, costly miskeying, and
formula errors, as well as the data’s security.”
To calculate their cash position, treasurers
and their assistants used LaSalle Bank’s
electronic-banking service CashPro to
download their bank account data through a
Bank Administration Institute (BAI) data feed,
or in report format. Clients then had to enter
the data manually into their spreadsheets.
“For a larger client that’s downloading
accounting information from more than one
bank, entering BAI data into a cash-position
worksheet could take four hours,” explains
Scully. “The client couldn’t examine the
details behind the data either, and the data
was only good for one day.”
As a growing number of customers expressed
their need for a more efficient way to
determine their cash position, LaSalle Bank
began to think about ways it could
accommodate its customers’ wishes. “For
several years, we had been looking at
creating a cash-position Excel worksheet that
integrates with CashPro to streamline cash-
position calculations,” recalls Santiago. “But
until now, our product and the Microsoft
Office software lacked maturity.”
Solution
“Our service is unique—
customers don’t have to
do anything different;
they are using Excel
2003 already—yet
we’ve taken an
inefficient daily process
and transformed it into
a seamless experience
with huge payoffs.”
John Scully, First Vice President, Electronic
Banking, LaSalle Bank
When LaSalle Bank discovered the XML
capabilities within Microsoft Office
Professional Edition 2003, it recognized that
now it could turn its idea into a viable
business solution. A language that describes
both the content and appearance of data,
XML is used to share business information on
the Web without worrying about incompatible
programs, computer networks, data
structures, and operating systems. Because
XML is not limited to proprietary computer
languages, it enables the exchange of
information between normally incompatible
systems.
To enable the free flow of data from CashPro
directly into a customer’s XML-enabled Excel
worksheet, LaSalle Bank used its existing
investment in Web service interfaces to
provide the link that it needed to integrate its
customers’ worksheets with the CashPro
solution that provides the BAI data feed.
Santiago believes that the introduction of
XML into familiar desktop tools reflects the
Microsoft commitment to continual
innovation in response to market needs.
“Both Microsoft and LaSalle Bank listen to
customers and work together to provide
solutions, not just technology, that answer
our customers’ business challenges.”
After working with Microsoft on the project’s
conceptual framework, LaSalle Bank hired a
third-party consultant to talk to 60 clients to
gain a better understanding of how they
calculated cash position, how they created
cash forecasts, and the challenges those
tasks presented. Drawing on the findings, the
bank then designed a best practices Excel
2003 spreadsheet with embedded formulas.
Thanks to XML support in Excel 2003, the
spreadsheet would be capable of consuming
automated BAI data feeds from CashPro.
Then LaSalle Bank partnered with RDA
Corporation, a Microsoft Gold Certified
Partner, to build the XML interface that would
link the spreadsheet with CashPro. Initial
meetings focused on the project’s
parameters:
A simple distribution model
Easy, self-service installation
 Low maintenance
 Minimal training required
 Locally encrypted data


“The people at RDA understood right away
what we were trying to do,” recalls Scully.
“They helped us improve the application
through iterative prototypes and testing.
Often they would take our ideas and go one
step further. It was a great partnership.”
Simplifying Development with
Visual Studio .NET
RDA created the interface, using the
Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003
development system and Visual Studio Tools
for the Microsoft Office System. “These were
the perfect tools to fulfill all the project’s
requirements cost-effectively,” says RDA
Developer Steve Stefanovich, who acted as
Principal Architect for the project. “The
primary advantage of using Visual Studio
Tools for Microsoft Office is that we could
easily distribute the Excel spreadsheet. This
was important for LaSalle Bank; many of its
customers’ computers are locked down, so
customers can’t run an installation easily.”
Accelerating Excel 2003
Dubbed CashPro Accelerate™, the new
solution developed by LaSalle Bank in
partnership with RDA is an add-in to Excel
that parses BAI data into the best practices
Excel cash-position worksheet designed by
LaSalle Bank. CashPro is responsible for
generating BAI-formatted financial data and
CashPro Accelerate is the client for viewing
and manipulating the data in an Excel-based
interface with security enhancements. By
automating the BAI feed, the solution
accelerates the creation of each XML-enabled
Excel cash-position worksheet.
Customers can choose from two “static”
versions of CashPro Accelerate, allowing
financial managers to choose between a best
practices worksheet with a horizontal view of
dates and data and one with a vertical view. A
third version, called the Ad Hoc Spreadsheet,
allows customers to create their own cashposition worksheet style. The solution is
deployed to customers—who must have
installed Microsoft Office Professional Edition
2003 or Office Enterprise Edition 2003 with
the latest updates—either through onsite
visits or by downloading the application from
a secure Web site.
Benefits
With CashPro Accelerate, LaSalle Bank can
offer its customers a value-added service that
integrates seamlessly into the bank’s existing
Web-based application. Data fields in a
CashPro Accelerate spreadsheet are
protected, which helps prevent the alteration
or misinterpretation of encrypted figures. The
bank’s customers can now import their
account information directly from CashPro
into an Excel spreadsheet running on their
local machines to access real-time cashmanagement positions.
“No other bank is using Excel 2003 and XML
to automate the calculation of liquidity,”
reports Scully. “Our service is unique—
customers don’t have to do anything
different; they are using Excel 2003 already—
yet we’ve taken an inefficient daily process
and transformed it into a seamless
experience with huge payoffs.”
Using CashPro Accelerate, LaSalle Bank’s
customers can trust their account data in a
way they couldn’t before. They are improving
liquidity management, saving time, increasing
data accuracy and value, sharing important
information for management decision
making, and integrating the solution into their
back-end systems to increase the value of
their data across the enterprise. These
benefits seemed so obvious to the first user
group to see a CashPro Accelerate demo that
they burst into spontaneous applause.
“We kept hearing, ‘Why hasn’t this been done
before?’ ” recalls Santiago. “We have a client
who made a considerable investment in a
treasury workstation, but now with Excel
2003 and CashPro Accelerate, he’s
discovered a more flexible and efficient way
to address his reporting needs. With
automated downloads, PivotTable views, and
embedded formulas, the company is saving
anywhere from four to eight hours a day in
manual data entry and cash-position
calculations across all its business units.”
Benefits to Bank Customers
Today, LaSalle Bank’s customers have more
faith in their financial information. Because
formulas are embedded in the spreadsheet,
the solution requires minimal data entry;
therefore, there are virtually no errors. “Our
clients were always concerned about making
costly errors,” says Scully. “One zero in the
wrong place can add up to an expensive
mistake. A simple tool that delivers an
accurate understanding of funds available for
investment opportunities, or a better
understanding of outstanding debt, is a very
compelling value proposition for our
customers.”
CashPro Accelerate not only enables
customers to improve liquidity management—
to increase investment income and reduce
debt servicing—but also increases the value
of that information for decision making
across the enterprise. “Before, our customers
could not see the details behind the data,”
explains Scully. “With CashPro Accelerate, all
they do is click the item, and they can see the
wire transfers or checks associated with the
numbers. Previously, cash-position worksheet
data was only good for a day. But CashPro
Accelerate saves the data on a client’s local
machine, which opens up new opportunities
for trend analysis to improve customers’
understanding of their liquidity management.
“CashPro Accelerate allows customers to
better analyze their daily cash-management
performance, something they couldn’t do
before,” continues Scully. “Customers are
finding this new knowledge empowering.”
LaSalle Bank’s customers can also add notes
to transactions to record background
information for their own use, and they can
report and share that information with others.
“Some of our customers tie the solution into
their current Excel-based solutions that
integrate into back-end processes. This
improves the flow of financial information
throughout the enterprise,” says Santiago.
Benefits to LaSalle Bank
In an industry sector known for competitive
pressures that put a high premium on
customer service, CashPro Accelerate gives
LaSalle Bank an edge in the market that’s
generating new business, increasing
customer loyalty, and positioning the bank as
a technologically savvy market leader.
“One month after launching the service at the
Association for Financial Professionals
Conference (AFP) last October, we had 70
potential customers,” says Scully. “Some of
our customers have switched from using a
treasury workstation in favor of CashPro
Accelerate. We’ve had customers that were
contemplating buying the treasury
workstation and, after seeing our product,
opted for CashPro Accelerate. It’s not difficult
to sell.”
CashPro Accelerate perfectly aligns with
LaSalle Bank’s branding, which emphasizes
making more things possible for its clients.
Because clients that begin using CashPro
Accelerate are unlikely to give it up, the new
solution encourages long-term customer
relationships.
“The basic technology behind CashPro
Accelerate, Excel 2003, is redefining our
organization,” says Santiago. “Before, our
customers only valued our services at the
beginning and end of a process: When a
client needs to obtain information or is going
to perform a transaction based on that
information. Expanding the franchise doesn’t
happen if the only time the client thinks
about LaSalle Bank is at these two
endpoints—most banks can deliver
information or process a transaction.
However, when we give customers solutions
that address a real business issue—
particularly one that affects the company’s
bottom line, we truly become more involved
in that company’s working capital cycle.
LaSalle’s consultative, relationship-driven
approach and services like CashPro
Accelerate will increase the value in our client
relationships unlike anything we have done
before.”
Of course, it helps that CashPro Accelerate is
not replaceable by an Excel-based cashposition tool from any other bank. But
according to Santiago, it’s the simplicity of
the solution that provides the underpinnings
of its success. “Simplicity means ease of use,
low up-front costs, low maintenance, and
minimal training and disruption. These are all
things our clients want to hear,” he says. “But
for us, simplicity represents something else:
seeing a different way to solve our customers’
business pains using technology they are
comfortable with—regardless of where our
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Microsoft Office System
competitors are going in the market. We
listened to our customers and they gave us
their problems. Microsoft gave us XML.
Together we worked out a simple solution. It’s
an accomplishment our clients value and we
take pride in.”
The Microsoft Office System is the business
world’s chosen environment for information
work, providing the programs, servers, and
services that help you succeed by
transforming information into impact.
For more information about the Microsoft
Office System, go to:
www.microsoft.com/office
For more information about RDA
Corporation products and services, call
(888) 441-1278 or visit the Web site at:
www.rdacorp.com
For more information about LaSalle Bank’s
CashPro service, call (312) 904-2963 or
visit the Web site at:
www.lasallebank.com/commercial
/tm_ebanking.html
Software and Services

Microsoft Office System
− Microsoft Office Professional Edition
2003
− Microsoft Office Excel 2003
 Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003
Partners

© 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT
MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY. Microsoft, Excel, the Office logo, PivotTable, and
Visual Studio are either registered trademarks or trademarks of
Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other
countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective
owners.
Document published February 2006

Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 Tools for the
Microsoft Office System
RDA Corporation