Banca Ifis

How Banca Ifis optimise its HR department?

atres
financial suite

Sector

Bank & Insurance

finance expertise

Employees

1 764

recruitment management

Location

Italy

Challenges

The Banca Ifis Group is an active player, specialty in finance. Its main business activities are: corporate credit services and solutions and acquisition/management of impaired loan portfolios. Founded in 1983 by Sebastien Egon Furstenberg, current Chairman, Banca Ifis has been listed on the Milan Stock Exchange (Star segment) since 2003. The company has grown considerably over the last 10 years, from around 300 employees to 1764.

The Group’s business model is characterised by a strong digital and web identity. Banca Ifis has been pushing the accelerator of technological transformation for years.
In this context of continuous innovation, the digitisation of HR processes is also part of it: an opportunity to redefine, with a view to improvement, the processes by the HR Department in order to integrate them into a single platform and digitalise them, automating operational activities and freeing up time for activities with greater added value.

Solutions

The project with Talentia, called Ifis Talent, involved analysing the main HR processes affected by the change before configuring and implementing the supporting digital functionalities. The main processes created and/or modified were: management of employee records, organisation charts, management of evaluation and feedback processes, management of the salary review process, planning of classroom and distance learning and organisation management.

The first step was the launch of the new performance management system, developed by Talentia Software, in January 2018. In the following months, other functions were gradually added, such as: the possibility of consulting the company’s organisation chart, an address book for contacting colleagues, the assignment of objectives by the manager and the possibility of giving feedback to employees on an ongoing basis.

One of the most important milestones of the project was the addition of the training module, which was activated in July 2018 and enabled the integration between performance assessment and development actions. The digital platform is visible to everyone, as are the classroom training catalogues, which are accessible through authorisation processes linked to the performance management process: during the interview, the employee and manager choose the training course according to the role occupied and the skills profile.

Other important changes took place in 2019, including the digitisation of the reward system with the Talentia HCM solution. Employee cycle management was optimised, engagement and involvement were improved and continuous feedback based on social networking approaches was implemented.

Results

The key success factor of the project is certainly the value linked to the increased availability of HR information, perceived by all the actors involved in the various processes:

On the HR side, in addition to a more effective ‘user experience’, the concentration of all HR data in a single platform has increased the efficiency of activities and the reliability of information and has made it possible to monitor indicators on employees and processes. By launching new processes, HR has also been able to influence employees’ motivational aspects more effectively.

On the Manager’s side, the availability of new tools to monitor data and information on its employees (contractual and salary levels, training, performance) has led to greater autonomy and professional growth. The role of the manager is certainly changing radically, driven by training and greater involvement in processes.

On the Employee side, greater involvement linked to access to information in the areas of training and development.

To date, however, it is already possible to see the positive impact of innovation in the bank’s HR area:

From the training point of view, since January there has been an increase in hours dedicated to training from 27% to 36%; bearing in mind that the video lasts only a few minutes, this means that people have greatly appreciated the new methods of delivery.

From the Performance Management point of view, the platform has made it possible to monitor the process more closely from both a qualitative and quantitative point of view: 90% of people received feedback within the initial deadline;

From the point of view of the Reward System, the process made it possible to significantly reduce the time spent on printing paper letters (around 3 weeks), considering that they were automatically generated by the system during the feedback from the manager.