Case Study: FirstRand achieves 50% boardroom production cost savings with Diligent Boards (Diligent)

First Rand Bank saves an estimated 50% on boardroom production costs in 2012

FirstRand is a leading African financial services group with 34,000 employees, 800 branches and 6,290 ATMs across Southern Africa and neighbouring countries. Its company secretariat produced more than 8,700 individual board packs for some 600 meetings a year using an “assembly-line” process of manual collation, hand-stamping and couriering, which consumed most of the team’s time and left little capacity for improving board materials.

FirstRand deployed the Diligent Boards solution to eliminate paper, enable instant synced updates and provide secure delivery. In the first year the bank cut production, assembly and delivery costs from nearly R14,000,000 (US$1.55M) to a savings of R6,887,177 (US$764,000) — a 49% reduction overall and a 78% drop in staff costs — while saving over 4 million sheets of paper and freeing the secretariat to focus on content quality, access and real‑time updates.

FirstRand

Martha Bromilow

Head of Company Secretariat