In November 2020, we released a special edition of ANVA magazine devoted entirely to our partner landscape. This magazine bears the subtitle: a growing ecosystem for a demanding market. We are now a year and a half down the road and the ecosystem has indeed grown considerably. Moreover, the ecosystem is increasingly appreciated by our customers. We are pleased to see that customers regularly purchase multiple partner solutions. High time for an update!
First, we would like to take a moment to reflect on the added value of the ecosystem. The term ecosystem comes from biology, but is also applied in economics. The core idea of a business ecosystem is that together you provide more value for customers, with each participant doing so from their own strengths. Exactly that is what we do together with our partners.
For our joint customers, the main advantage is that our partners - together with ANVA - offer more functionality, thus better supporting or even optimizing business processes. They do this by using reliable links developed and maintained by ANVA. In the unlikely event of any incidents, we naturally resolve these among ourselves, thus unburdening our customers.
Let's give a real-life example of how this works. One of our newest partners is Finly. Finly's strength is risk management: Finly offers solutions for risk management (business and private), AOV advice and ORV advice both before, during and after an advisory or sales meeting. Thanks to the link with Finly, our joint customers can perform risk management for their clients even more efficiently and effectively. The link between both systems offers ANVA users a worry-free and error-free tool for call reports, making duplicate administration work a thing of the past. Moreover, the link automatically supplements advice reports with customer data (including name and address, e-mail address and telephone number), relationship data (of both partner and child(ren)) and product data. Also, documents and any action items are written back from Finly to ANVA. The result? The link between ANVA and Finly saves our customers a lot of time when working with both systems. With the elimination of duplicate administration, they can focus on what they do best: the advisory process.
This example already shows that ANVA itself is an important participant within the ecosystem. Yet that goes a bit further than just the example we just gave. The best way to make that clear is to compare the ecosystem to a soccer team. The goal is to play together so that we not only achieve our common goal but also enable our customers playing in the striker's box to score points. As a result, ANVA is not only a player in the ecosystem but also a captain. First and foremost, this means that we carefully select new players. We have developed a partner qualification process for this purpose, so that we can be sure that a potential partner fits into the ecosystem and can (continue to) provide additional added value in its field for a large group of customers.
If so, we begin the partnership by signing a partner agreement. In this, the partner is responsible for sales, delivery and further development of its product, and we facilitate where necessary and possible. This formula allows a partner to also enter into a partnership with our competitor, provided we can also enter into multiple partnerships in a domain. This ensures that we can offer our customers the best choices available in the market.
Of course we have regular meetings with each partner, where we discuss both commercial and substantive points. But we go even further in our role of captain: we want to facilitate our players wherever possible, so that they can maximize their strengths on the field. To this end, we establish short lines of communication with our product owners, consultants, account managers, service desk and we do joint marketing campaigns, webinars in our studio and support each other on social media.
Despite all good and intended intentions, we sometimes see that cooperation does not work out after all. In that case, we say goodbye to a partner; after all, there are other soccer clubs in our market. Unlike most soccer clubs, we involve our supporters who pay our season tickets. After all: it is precisely our customers who are part of the ecosystem. In 2021, we therefore expanded our ambassador program so that, in addition to customers who work in co-creation with ANVA on our own developments, we also highlight customers who are involved in the development of our business partners in collaboration with ANVA. This resulted in as many as seven ambassadors, for whom - together with our partners - we organized the first partner and ambassador day in 2021.
Another principle of a business ecosystem is that connections are also made between ecosystem participants. That is the next step we are taking now. How great would it be if we create even more value by partners working together?
A prime example of this is our partnership with HippoLine. They helped us develop the ANVA Data Warehouse, which is an important source for the product they developed: the HippoLine Insurance Platform (HIP). This online BI environment runs dozens of apps that give our customers insight into processes, results, commercial opportunities and risks. External data sources and financial administrations can also be linked to HIP. If, as a customer, you now use various partner solutions, it would of course be great if you could feed HIP with that data, so that you can include it in your analyses. That's why we encourage our partners to talk to HippoLine about this and make the interconnection.
Another cross connection is literally across borders. For example, we see that our clients in the Caribbean have now also discovered the power of the ecosystem. Stimulated by our local partner ISC 2.0, we see that some business partners are also becoming active here.
Our partner program fits seamlessly into ANVA's new journey goal. As our CEO Max Mouwen recently said: Together with our customers and our partners we will shape the renewal. To do so, we will start to design our partner model even more effectively and efficiently. That way we can discover how we can make it even easier and better for our customers.
That means continuing to expand the ecosystem so that, working closely with our customers and our partners, we develop and maintain a platform that continues to add value to a demanding market. We'll keep you posted on developments!
Would you like to know more about ANVA's ecosystem or are you curious about what it can do for you? Then feel free to contact our partner manager Ronald Rongen. He will gladly tell you all the ins and outs. Prefer to read more first? Take a look at our updated partner page.
