Background
NORD/LB Norddeutsche Landesbank is one of Germany's leading commercial banks. As an institute under public law, it is part of the S-Finance Group.
Its core business segments include corporate customers, special financing in the energy and infrastructure sectors and for aircraft, financing commercial real estate via Deutsche Hypo, capital market business, association business with the savings banks and private and commercial customers, including private banking.
The bank is based in Hanover, Braunschweig and Magdeburg and has branches in Oldenburg, Hamburg, Schwerin, Düsseldorf and Munich. Outside Germany, NORD/LB is represented by a Pfandbrief bank (NORD/LB Covered Bond Bank) in Luxembourg and by branches in London, New York and Singapore.
It values compliance training to ensure regulatory compliance and reduce business risk. They regard training as positively impacting both their business and brand.
Challenge
NORD/LB wanted to ensure that their training was engaging, relevant and, where possible, enjoyable for their learners.
During 2023, the London branch had a 25% increase in staff.
These new joiners tended to be younger and used to consuming content through TikTok and YouTube videos. Many hadn't worked in the industry before, so the training topics were new, whilst others came from overseas and, while familiar with financial services, were new to UK regulations.
Employees' first experience within an organisation is often their induction. Good, well-planned programs create a better first impression and help staff retention.
Solution
As a solution, NORD/LB chose Skillcast Compliance Bites. They are short microlearning videos on specific compliance issues, such as insider trading, special category data, tipping off and whistleblowing.
They bring topics to life in just a few minutes through animation, engaging characters and relatable storylines.
NORD/LB has been very creative with Compliance Bites, combining them with Skillcast's regulatory technology features by creating learning paths around topics.
One example was logging face-to-face training via Training 360, followed by Compliance Bites modules, and finishing the learning journey with reading and attesting to a related company policy.
Having the flexibility of the Compliance Bites made it much easier for NORD/LB to assign relevant training to individual learners. Across induction meetings and learning paths, they helped introduce learners to a new topic to familiarise themselves with before entering a full-length module.
Outcome
What is powerful with NORD/LB's approach is that they can now run reports for auditing purposes to evidence to auditors that offline and online training has been completed and that policies have been read and attested to.
In the year that Compliance Bites were introduced, NORD/LB was able to cover more topics for their learners. They assigned full-length modules for their most important topics, then used the Compliance Bites modules for other topics that, whilst important, they didn't want to take up too much of learners' time.
New joiners have a better experience and are eased into their training through engaging, easily understood, bite-sized modules with short assessments to test knowledge and build their confidence to progress to further training.
Following the introduction of Compliance Bites, the bank has seen increased pass rates and scores in the related full-length training modules.
Feedback
“It’s been a very positive experience for me. The videos make training easier to follow, it's much quicker to learn things, and overall it takes up less of my time. So well done on this new format, it gets a thumbs up from me! “
