Indusind Bank is close to completing the latest major portion of its bank-wide transformation with the implementation of Infosys’ Finacle core banking system. To handle the training challenge related to this, it has adopted a third-party tool from a company called GIEOM.
End-user training has been under way for around three months and is a large task. The bank has 6-7000 end-users to be trained on the core banking system, of which the 40 to 45 per cent most intensive users, such as those in operations, branch managers and relationship managers, will undergo face-to-face training. However, all users are first going through remote training and Sharma is unaware of any other Indian bank that has used a similar model.
There are plenty of computer-based training (CBT) tools in the market, says Sharma. However, these are generic, ‘so you end up doing all the legwork’. Indusind Bank uses a CBT offering elsewhere in its organisation but decided that it wanted something that added more value and was tailored for core banking. At about the same time, Gieom was starting to emerge. Working at the Indian Institute of Management, John Santhosh and a few other ex-I-flex Solutions staff had been studying the topic of training for core banking system projects. The first year had been purely research, says Santhosh, after which it gained a small number of services customers. Its cloud-based testing tool started to emerge and it gained Mauritius Commercial Bank as an early adopter, for its roll-out of Temenos’ T24 (IBS, January 2012, Change management case study: MCB). Other takers include National Commercial Bank in Saudi Arabia, Ecobank in Africa (IBS, May 2012, Case study: One for the money) and Metlife in India.
The traditional ‘train the trainer’ approach has never worked well, believes Santhosh. With the Gieom approach, a bank’s documented material is initially loaded into the cloud and converted into process flows in the supplier’s offshore operation in Bangalore. This typically takes three months and might involve between 300 and 500 processes at an average bank, he says. The bank’s screens are then captured, are also uploaded to the cloud, and linked to the processes. 80 per cent of the work is offshore, he says. The bank is then trained to use and make changes to the content, so that it takes full ownership. Read more
