Strategic partnerships
Strategic partnerships are a key part of VP Bank’s business model. Cooperative ventures are a means of combating rising costs, increasing efficiency and jointly taking advantage of market circumstances. The cooperating partners can thus use their knowledge, capabilities and information.
Through these partnerships, VP Bank strives to generate synergies for both firms and thereby develop new business models based on alliances. These partnerships also help to promote the sharing of best practices and support for innovations. VP Bank is constantly sharing experiences with other banks and service providers in order to use and optimise available resources. Sharing know-how benefits all participants and makes it possible to serve clients more effectively.
Partnering in the investment area
In spring 2017, the Group Investment Center began working systematically with selected asset managers. VP Bank thereby seeks close cooperation with targeted partners in order to offer their clients demonstrable value added in the products area. This approach provides access to attractive, institutional investment strategies that would otherwise be out of reach due to high entry barriers or not covered by the established fund selection process.
The investment partnering concept offers clients easier access, lower costs and a wider range of yield and risk profiles, and the ability to scale up as needed provides access to the most up-to-date and cutting edge market expertise. It also increases efficiency while lowering costs. The integration into the investment process of VP Bank provides investors with additional security.
Based on the partnering concept, we further expanded and broadened our partnerships last year and intensified the support of existing investment programs. The focus was primarily on the investment of our own funds and the development of VP Bank’s own private market portfolio. On the one hand, this strengthens the cooperation with a wide variety of managers and, on the other, serves as a basis for market access for clients. In the future, platform solutions that are better able to manage the bundling of interests than individual managers will increasingly be taken into consideration within this concept. The range of services will be expanded and strategically developed in 2020.
Other partnerships
Since 2010 VP Bank has worked with Liechtensteinische Landesbank (LLB) on printing and mailing account and deposit statements, quarterly and annual reporting and all types of customised bulk mailing and created a joint purchasing company.
In another strategic cooperation with LLB, VP Bank’s business processes are supported through flexible, stable and effective IT and logistics services. As part of this cooperation, VP Bank has leased space at LLB’s data centre since 2012.
Another longstanding partnership exists with a third-party provider for the Group-wide procurement and management of financial information systems at optimised cost and performance. This partnership enables VP Bank to optimise related processes such as operating and contract management, reporting and support while sustainably lowering costs. Among the results of this partnership was the creation in 2011 of a joint venture with LLB for financial information systems procurement.