Digital transformation has given Spanish banking culture a 180-degree spin. The main players in the banking industry have found themselves having to adapt to a completely new way of operating in a few short years.
One of the national main contenders – as in, one of those banks who, if it had fallen would have brought down the entire Spanish financial system – found itself faced with this same glaring need for digital transfer in its day-to-day workings.
This bank was the offspring of two Spanish giants in building society culture when they amalgamated in 2010, incorporating a further five regional building societies along with them. This new banking entity inherited a strong legacy in its extension of branches across the country, but the flipside was an underdeveloped digital infrastructure.
Its considerable workforce needed to be brought up to date. For this reason it was decided by the department of internal communication that the bank must meet the challenge of digital transformation, for its staff in particular, with the initiation of an internal digital platform.
To rise to these demands of the digital sphere, the bank trusted in Opinno and our team of experts here to create an intranet for the company, the first step in their digital strategy. At Opinno we were charged with envisaging its form and representation plus the design and development of the new platform.
Good Practice
At the initiation of the project we used a technique called benchmarking to get the ball rolling. This process consists of surveying how leaders in the sector were responding to the novelties inherent in establishing a new platform of this type and adapting those findings to our client’s needs along with the corresponding improvements we saw as necessary.
To implement these improvements, our first port of call was to ensure we knew what the precise requirements of employees at the bank were. To that end we underwent an interview process to enquire about qualifications, skills and training, as well as research into employee expectations of the process to safeguard our results adapting to the needs and preferences of the community of users as a whole.
This contact was key in establishing what kind of use the community of users would be making of the portal. This stage also furnished us with valuable pointers as to the exact shape the digital infrastructure should take in order to respond to the type of communication that would be shared. Running parallel to this was the strong desire to improve the quality of interactions and user experience.
Once this stage was finalized, we were able to initiate an integral service design, followed by the software development or programming tool. We developed the portal with Drupal Technology to facilitate the content management framework and we included an interactive, multimedia support framework specially conceived for online professional development or e-learning. Once we had achieved that phase, we proceeded to test the platform out with an authentic community of users ahead of its instigation.
Platform launch
Once the tool had been designed and created, we then needed to oversee the technical maintenance but also the management and invigoration of the community of users and their results measured in order to deploy the required strategy of transformation.
Aside from maintaining the infrastructure, we at Opinno also measured both the rate of use and the evaluations of the users in order to maximize these results. This implies, among other uses, a more dynamic interaction between participants on the portal; it resolves doubts more rapidly and manages the assimilation of new innovation concepts via the platform.
Once the working system had been evaluated, Opinno’s specialists in digital transformation will continue in a long-term commitment with the host bank. This role extends from coordinating with the team at the bank, updating the content on the portal as well as invigorating the community of users through resources such as e-learning courses.
