ABN AMRO builds a single, centralized learning platform for easier training

ABN AMRO is one of the leading banks in the Netherlands with a rich history, dating back more than 300 years. With a main focus on Northwest Europe and offices worldwide, they provide loans, mortgages and other banking services and solutions to companies and individuals. ABN AMRO has a clear purpose: banking for better, for generations to come. They work together with their clients to tackle the challenges of our times and to shape the future.

The vision is to be a personal bank in the digital age, serving clients where they have scale in the Netherlands and 14 other different countries worldwide. There are more than 19,000 ABN AMRO employees – and another 5,600 temporary workers and sub-contractors.

The Challenge

The challenge for ABN AMRO was to adapt the total learning ecosystem as seamlessly as possible to the wishes and needs of its employees. For example, the bank wanted to move from multiple separate platforms to one total solution to ensure an optimal learning and employee journey. In this total solution it had to be possible to call various learning sources via one central search functionality. This would make the search more efficient and clearer.

With this improvement, ABN AMRO wants to ensure the professional development of its employees, whereby management maintains control of and insight into the compliance aspects of its banking organization, among other things.

The Solution

With Totara at the heart of ABN AMRO’s learning ecosystem, Totara Partner Bloomville offers the bank the optimal learning and employee journey they were looking for. The entire learning offer is fully integrated in the new complete solution. This is partly due to the enormous possibilities that Totara offers with its available APIs.

The robustness and security of Totara, in combination with a MySQL database, was chosen to process and secure order requests and cancellations, learning content, budget data, personal data and billing data. The open source nature of Totara has given Bloomville the opportunity to extend its code base with innovative and more common extensions. These extensions included a budget meter, giving employees a real-time numerical and graphical view of the use of their personal development budget, a budget feed, a training evaluation plugin, an iDEAL payment plugin and extensions on existing reports, as well as making new ones.

What they have achieved is 1) a more user-friendly learning environment, with better search and filter options for the (internal and external) training offer, 2) a larger and more relevant employee training catalog that is easy to manage internally, 3) integration of the “separate” learning environments within ABN AMRO (which also include important compliance components) into one learning ecosystem with one unified front-end experience for the employee, and 4) implementation of this solution for colleagues across 14 countries worldwide.

Since ABN AMRO is an international organization, Bloomville configured “MyLearning” with an audience-based portal and catalog. In this way, all employees use the same portal and have access to the global catalog, regardless of the country in which they work. However, they will also see content and have access to courses that are specifically adapted for their country. Notifications and reminders ensure that throughout the organization, both learners and managers are aware of status and progress at all times. With this, the compliance goals have also been achieved. ABN AMRO now has worldwide insight into the status of mandatory certifications anytime and anywhere.

The Results

The result is a “unified front-end experience” with one personalized dashboard for all learning activities and results from the various sources within the learning ecosystem.

Approximately 25,000 employees can use a broad (around 7,000 active courses) and more relevant catalog, with advanced search and filter functionality and access to reviews (ratings). The catalog can be easily managed and contains both internal and external learning activities in various learning forms. Learners can also order physical and ebooks, or sessions with selected coaches via a coach module. The offer of some online platforms has also been integrated.

During the registration process, training can be funded from both company budget and personal budget (development budget from CLA or mobility budget).

ABN AMRO now has a centralized and real-time insight into the compliance of all its employees, and can report on this both internally and to external supervisors.

The various countries worldwide have been able to indicate “local wishes,” and the worldwide rollout across the countries will take place in phases in the coming period, according to plan.

In the first seven months since go-live on July 1st 2021, more than 184,000 registrations have already been carried out in the Totara-based solution. Over 450 active certifications are facilitated and monitored in Totara.

Due to the broadening of the catalog, many more registrations (and spend) have been “consolidated” to preferred suppliers with whom discount agreements have been made.

ABN AMRO now receives a lot of positive reactions from employees about the employee journey and about how easy it is to search and register.