HMA - IBRF
Online forum for UK banks
The Inter Bank Rating Forum (IBRF) is a commercial ratepayers forum comprising most of the financial community in the UK including HBOS plc, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Nationwide, Barclays, Lloyds TSB, HSBC and Alliance & Leicester to name but a few.
The IBRF members’ property interests are located in virtually every town and city in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland and with estate teams for each financial institution located in a different area of the UK, secure digital communication is key to the success of information distribution and activity co-ordination within the forum.
Having previously worked closely with HBOS plc Group Property on a number of projects, HBOS’ Group Rating Manager (and Vice Chairman of the IBRF), Roger Littlewood appointed HMA to create, manage and maintain the IBRF brand primarily from a digital perspective.
With the public facing area of the website dedicated to providing information about the work of the IBRF and its members, the main activity goes on behind the scenes in a password protected area of the website. With global access 24/7, HMA’s Storehold provided the perfect solution to the IBRF’s communication needs. Where documents of a sensitive nature are to be distributed, they are uploaded to the website and an email notification sent out to all members to inform them of the upload.
As well as document storage, integrated into Storehold is a Materials Change of Circumstance (MCC) database. This database acts as a central source for MCC appeals which achieve reductions in business rates for reasons such as disruptions, repairs etc. With financial institutions often located in close proximity to one and other in major towns and cities, external factors affecting trading – road works for example – are often experienced by a large percentage of members. By sharing this information, each IBRF member can keep informed of appeals made by other banks to assist them with making their own appeal to the Valuation Office Agency (VOA). Discussions are currently taking place to establish whether it would be feasible to share this information further with other organisations such as the British Retail Consortium (BRC).
On an ongoing basis, HMA provide a management service to the IBRF attending quarterly meetings, carrying out website updates via the content management system and co-ordinating digital communication across the members.
