Salt Learning won the award for working with 27 Mutual Banks to transition them to our Salt Platform
The Brief
- To transition 27 mutual banks onto an automated online compliance training platform/system to meet reporting and monitoring obligations. Some of the mutual banks involved were Community First Credit Union, Unity Bank, Southern Cross Credit Union, Orange Credit Union and First Option Bank.
- To update the format of their existing online compliance training courses to minimise time spent on training yet improve each learner’s level of competency to minimise the risk of breaches and organisational penalties.
The project was launched in 2018 and was to be completed by the end of 2019.
The Challenge
Over 4 million Australians bank with a mutual (or customer-owned) financial institution. These include mutual banks, credit unions and building societies.
While many mutual banks employ best practice staff training regimes, and cutting-edge technology, a substantial number still had manual or outdated e-learning and LMS facilities. The consequences of this were:
- Management of mandatory compliance training across their business was labour-intensive and subject to error
- Access to the latest and best compliance training products was limited
- Updating of training products to maintain currency in an environment of rapid regulatory change was subject to error and omission
Several impediments existed to any projects to address this problem, including budgetary limitations, sector and industry conservatism, and limited recognition of the benefits that would flow from addressing the issue.
GRCSolutions provides platform solutions that address these problems. Because we have a special relationship with the sector, we decided to undertake a project to bring our clients onboard with these products.
Throughout this project we were required to transition and introduce each mutual bank and a total of 1613 employees to a new automated system to meet ASIC and APRA requirements when being audited.
Strategy
The solution we proposed was to activate our Salt Compliance platform for these clients. It provides the facility to manage the full life-cycle of training – a cloud-based platform that enables staff to access training any time, anywhere. It has built-in reporting specifically designed for compliance, to allow management to monitor staff progress and check company-wide compliance activities. Salt Compliance helps clients to track training and policies, apply learning paths for different levels of staff, monitor and track performance and keep staff up to date with inbuilt, automated email notifications.
Salt is an online compliance training and reporting solution that is easy to implement and effectively manage training obligations. The system enables clients to perform the following key functions.
- Easily add and manage new users, and allow for client-side administration
- Quickly assign training on an individual or at a group or business unit level and provide automatic reminders if training is not completed within an assigned period
- Monitor when users should re-take the training
- Benefit from a comprehensive reporting suite that allows clients to monitor the success of the program and its learning outcomes, as well as attest to the accuracy of the training content for auditing and compliance purposes
GRC Solutions’ Client Services team and our Mutual Banks Account Manager had a clear and structured process for transitioning clients to the SALT platform. The process involved understanding client requirements in delivering training, who their users were, what training each group of employees needed, when the training needed to be completed, frequency of completion and associated reminders and reporting.
More detail on our Salt learning platforms here
Content
GRC Solutions maintains a suite of compliance training courses specifically for the customer-owned banking sector and similar banks. This comprehensive suite of courses are written to address all levels of banking staff and include tailored examples, scenarios and case studies. The training is written, designed and reviewed here in Australia by our team of experts, including our legal and regulatory banking team, who collectively have over 80 years’ experience in the Australian Financial Services sector.
Our team regularly checks the status of impending legal reforms that could affect our courses and our clients’ customised courses. We update the e-learning and publish a regular schedule of regulatory reform for our subscribers.
More detail on our suite of Financial Services courses here
Outcomes
All 27 of these clients were successfully transitioned over to the new online platform by the end of 2019 as expected:
- Total number of users (employees): 1613
- Average number of courses used by each mutual bank: 15
- Average increase in course subscription post implementation: 26% (Approx. 4 courses per client)
This project has reduced the time spent on monitoring and reporting by over 45% for all these banks and enhanced their ability to create effective, dynamic, scalable and reportable training to meet their compliance obligations.
Transitioning to the new Salt platform has enabled the mutual banks’ managers, compliance teams and senior leadership teams to quickly extract substantive real-time progress reports, summary reports, completion reports and pass rates for each employee and division.
The future
The future of learning within the banking sector will continue to become more and more complex due to the pace of regulatory changes and rigorous reporting obligations. This transformation project has enabled these banks to become more responsive by automating routine reporting and monitoring tasks.
With the increasing number of investigations and penalties due to breaches within the financial services sector, it is essential the revised format for compliance training for mutual banks has not been approached as a ‘tick and flick’ exercise. The Adaptive format adopted empowers and increases each learner’s level of competence, avoids repetition where appropriate and respects their workload.
Feedback
Community First transitioned to the Salt platform from a manual system back in January 2019. The system has provided a good base to help with managing our training to ensure compliance.
The ease of the system from the point of view of both management and staff, has been very positive and rewarding as they no longer are required to provide proof of training and sign verifications as this can now be managed by using the reporting system. The most positive review is that the training is now predominantly found in one place and they can easily see what training is to be completed.
From an administration point of view, it did take us time to adapt to the way the system worked but we were able to make some changes based on our needs, with the help from the support team.
The reporting system provides numerous reports which makes it easier to manage staff training and the email reporting system is a great tool for notification of release of new training and management of training coming due.
The Policy Builder is also another great tool to manage policy attestations. Again, the email reports can be used to manage notification and reminders.
We have also integrated our own internal training courses using Salt Adaptive into our Salt system which has also been a positive outcome.
The GRC Solutions support team are always available to help with any problems or issue that arise and to date, the response has usually been within 2-4 hours and any system issues that have arisen are quickly resolved.
Overall we have been happy with the system and the way it has helped us manage our training needs.
