Scottish National Investment Bank improves efficiency and visibility

The Scottish National Investment Bank➚ (the Bank) invests in businesses, projects, and communities that deliver environmental, social, and financial returns for the people of Scotland. For example, in early 2023 the Bank announced an investment of £6.6 million to support a pioneering clean energy firm based in Aberdeen, which has developed a battery storage system to reserve power generated from intermittent renewable energy sources. In the same year, the Bank also invested in companies specialising in medical technology, property energy efficiency, and cloud-based content management systems.

Processing and approving investment applications can be complex and time-consuming due to the volume of checks and approvals. The Bank needed a way to increase efficiency without impacting the quality of its funding decisions. With Salesforce, they can unify data and simplify workflows to help drive the investment cycle.

Making informed decisions is important. The Bank’s primary function is to provide financial backing to mission-aligned businesses and enable and encourage private sector investment.

To achieve its mission, the Bank needs to ensure it pursues investments that are focused on addressing the key challenges facing Scotland: the climate emergency, place-based inequality, and investment in innovation.

With smarter processes and richer insights, they can manage their investment pipeline and portfolio more efficiently and increase its impact. In just two years, it has enabled an investment commitment of more than £1 billion for the Scottish economy.

The Bank was founded in 2020 and knew from the outset that it wanted to apply CRM best practices to how it administered its investment pipeline and portfolio. It needed a proven solution that would be quick to install and easy to manage for its small internal team. With support from Bluewave, a Salesforce partner, the deployment of Sales Cloud was fast-tracked to the team as the Bank was growing and establishing itself.

The Scottish National Investment Bank has transformed the investment cycle by enabling greater efficiency, visibility, and consistency. Here’s how:

• Investment requests and decisions are captured in a central record on Sales Cloud. Automated workflows help to simplify the four-stage approval process, which means applications can be progressed with greater oversight and connectivity across the team.
• With visibility of every pending request and every past interaction, the Bank can allocate its resources more effectively to meet investment timelines. Tasks are automatically assigned to different team members and discussed via Chatter.
• A central record of the investment pipeline and portfolio enables them to identify and react to development trends and gaps. For example, it can see if a region is becoming a hub for renewables and organise an event to reach more businesses that align with its net zero mission.
• The Bank can also track current and future income from its investments, which helps improve financial forecasting and reporting. Over the next ten years, they will be responsible for administering up to £2 billion worth of public capital and must be able to demonstrate its impact and performance.
• Managing investment approvals on a single platform instead of multiple spreadsheets has helped to strengthen compliance and governance. The Bank can identify potential investment conflicts and conduct internal audits more efficiently.
• Custom Salesforce objects have been configured to support specific business processes such as supplier contract management, and gift and hospitality declaration. Using automated workflows for approvals and reminders, the Bank can apply consistent controls.
• Smarter processes and richer insights helped the Bank commit more than £445 million of investment and mobilise a further £703 million for 28 businesses within the first two years of its existence.
• With Salesforce, they can quickly introduce new features that help its teams work more efficiently. For example, building the gifts and hospitality workflows took just three days. Using a cloud-based platform also helps to reduce IT costs and complexity.