Piraeus Bank - Dimitris Mavroyiannis

Convene Customer Success

Piraeus Bank

We spoke to Christina Giannopoulou at Piraeus Bank about how Convene has improved operational effectiveness and streamlined administrative processes.

Image: Dimitris Mavroyiannis, COO

Piraeus Bank is a Greek multinational financial services company with its headquarters in Athens. Piraeus Bank's stocks have been listed on the Athens Stock Exchange since January 1918. They have been a customer of Convene since December 2016.
Convene functions across complex executive structures

We have our Executive members of the bank and further members who also participate in the activities of our steering committees and in the other committees of the bank. We have many different committees, there are currently eighteen, each made up of twelve members. Convene is used by the Executive members participating across all of these committees.

Accessible and secure

We were searching for a tool that was intuitive for our Executive members to use. It was important for our members to be able to access information easily and to share important documents during meetings. It was essential for this to be done securely, so security was a key issue for us.

Lengthy administrative processes pre-Convene

Our Corporate Governance unit is comprised of committees and Secretaries providing administrative support to those committees. They would be responsible for preparing the agenda and compiling the documents pertinent to each agenda item. Meeting packs were in hard copy.

For steering committee meetings, there were usually eight agenda items, so meeting packs could be comprised of 200 sheets of paper. It obviously took a lot of time and effort to put meeting packs of this size together. Of course, we do have Executive members who have a preference for paper, but we are largely paperless since Convene was introduced.

Convene delivering superior value 

We did look at other products. We looked at solutions offered by Microsoft, Boardpad (proposed by Gartner), and Boardpacks.

However, we really liked the user interface of the Convene application and we found it very user friendly. It also represented the best value for money compared to the other solutions we looked at!

Range of useful features

We find the Document library particularly useful. It is great to have the ability to make annotations or add comments on existing documents, and then be able to log action items which can be followed up in subsequent meeting agendas. For remote working, Convene is proving to be very beneficial since you can access the platform on a range of offline devices, so it’s possible to work effectively no matter where you are or what time it is.

Option of Scalability

We are currently running 150 licences and making maximum use of them. We are not currently considering further expansion; however, things do change! So that may be something we consider in the future depending upon our requirements.

Positive Feedback across different user groups

We have two user groups here, our Executive Members, and our Secretaries. Our Secretaries like the system, they find it user friendly, they like the fact that documents can be stored securely in the Document Library within specific folders according to date and document description.

'To summarise, Convene has significantly improved our operational effectiveness and made it possible for valuable processes to be more streamlined.'

For our Executive members, Convene has received a positive reception. There are some members who prefer a more traditional approach, but the reception has still been overwhelmingly positive.

Continued Support

Convene has been in place for four years. There were some issues in the beginning, and we issued a number of support tickets. April in the Support division was always very helpful and willing to take care of the issue and to draw upon the relevant people and resources for addressing our support issue where necessary.

We are looking forward to upgrading to the latest version of Convene and to using the full range of the newest features.

Convene in a nutshell?

Convene is flexible and easy to use, with a very user-friendly interface!

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