Client Snapshot
The focus of AIB Finance & Leasing is asset finance and personal lending. Sandyford Credit Center is AIB’s largest department within Finance & Leasing, performing credit assessment, credit fulfillment, and credit management activities. AIB Finance & Leasing serves a number of channels, including their network of more than 250 branches, dealers, direct and Internet sales and online banking.  This busy center services 350,000 applications each year and 1.25 million phone calls, with over 200 full time employees, and brings in approximately €2.25 billion in annual sales. Regardless of the high loan volume handled, AIB F&L is committed to providing quality service, and is driven by their company culture and core set of values – honesty, integrity and fairness.

AIB F&L maintains a simple, but challenging vision as part of their long-term strategy for success, “to empower all team members to perform to their maximum with a human resources system that supports the management and development of staff,” says project manager Elise Privett.

The Business Challenge
Like most large financial companies, a major challenge for AIB F&L is successfully instilling change throughout the entire organization while maintaining their competitive advantage. As part of their vision, AIB F&L wanted to introduce career management within their organization. To successfully accomplish their goals they needed to empower their staff to deal with a constantlychanging environment while maintaining and growing their competencies. These combined challenges present a difficult picture for any organization. Based on direct feedback from team members, they knew that they needed a more streamlined way of providing timely information to their team members.

The company had already introduced a people management process and the next logical step was to look at automation as a way of improving efficiency. Billy Murtagh, Head of Credit Fulfillment, says “Performance Management was always part of our culture at AIB and it has become more prominent in recent years. We needed more visibility on how we were performing on a daily basis, and team members needed to see and understand how they are contributing to the overall business.”

As a result, AIB F&L began a search for an Employee Performance Management solution to enhance and automate the process that was fundamentally a manual one. AIB F&L involved all of the stakeholders early in the planning process and clearly defined their project goals,  being careful to align these goals with AIB’s corporate strategy. “We wanted our team members to view the project as a development tool to help them do their jobs better, not as someone looking over their shoulders,”  adds Nuala McGrath. 

AIB F&L wanted the ability to:

• Create a balanced daily view of performance
• Enable self-monitoring to help team members achieve their objectives
• Easily identify strengths
• Easily identify areas for development to facilitate targeted coaching
• Support the one-to-one and performance review process
• Reduce the amount of time spent generating reports to enable management to provide more coaching time

Solution Snapshot

John O’Mahony, Managing Director, affirms “Performix demonstrated a very strong understanding of how their system could be rolled out, not just from an IT infrastructure viewpoint, but more importantly from our people’s and customers’ perspective. They enabled us to change our approach to managing service within an operations environment.”

“We achieved good acceptance by involving team members and team leaders early. They helped design, build and test the system. The team members put a lot  of trust into the implementation team and Performix staff. One of the keys to our success was the consistent relationship we had with our Performix project managers. Their background in call center process and growing knowledge of how we ran our business was very important to our success,” says Nuala McGrath.

Benefits
With Performix, AIB F&L has experienced:

• Improved average handle time on loan decisions by 4%
• Improved average handle time on inbound calls by almost 7%
• A gain in trending information which will help with their capacity management

“A huge benefit was the amount of time saved through automation of the daily performance reports,” says Elise Privett.

“Team leaders can now spend more time coaching team members to drive individual performance.” Now team members can see their performance along with their existing quality information, and team leaders have also become more focused on training requirements. Billy Murtagh comments, “We also did not have the trending that we now have through Performix. Having the weekly and monthly trends is a huge benefit when it comes to conducting our monthly performance reviews. Team members can see their individual trends and understand their contribution to the business, and reviews have become more constructive as a result.”

Key Takeaways
AIB F&L credits their success to constant communication, involving all the stakeholders at the right time and careful attention to implementation and testing. One detail that Finance & Leasing was very sensitive about is the fact that they have some very long-tenured people, with some team members having been at AIB F&L for over fifteen years. Here they clearly communicated to these highly experienced professionals the advantages of gaining more visibility and greater control over their own performance. Communication continues to play a central role in defining and achieving AIB Finance & Leasing’s future successes.