Angusknight Pty Ltd

How online learning helped St.George Bank achieve a 20-fold increase in staff training and boost regulatory compliance while cutting costs by 25%

St.George Bank, a successful competitor in a domestic market dominated by Australia’s four largest banks, owes its success to service differentiation driven by product innovation and personalised customer care.

Traditionally the bank invested around 2% of its salary budget in staff development. But its management was increasingly frustrated by limited results achieved through conventional education. Training was generally restricted to entry-level induction and systems instruction for frontline customer service officers. Only two out of the bank’s seven divisions had formal training programs, and these were more tactical than strategic, while on the supply side St.George Bank had a fragmented network of some 770 training providers.

Overall, the bank felt it was generating little return on its A$13 million annual investment in training.

To address these low returns, St.George Bank partnered with SumTotal to develop a flexible online learning solution that today underpins a comprehensive blended learning strategy. Driven by an initial imperative to halve training costs, St.George moved all staff development to an e-learning platform powered by SumTotal System’s Aspen Suite.

The result was e-luminate, an award-winning online education environment that boosted training output 20-fold and extended staff development coverage to every business unit and every employee up to senior executive level. E-learning helped reduce training costs by approximately 25%, delivering a bottom-line saving in excess of A$3 million per annum together with vastly expanded business capabilities.

St.George Bank now regards e-learning as critical to its future competitiveness and is currently developing plans to roll out an online education program for business partners to further boost its market presence and revenue opportunities.

This white paper describes the challenges St.George Bank faced, the solution it built in partnership with SumTotal and the benefits that followed.