Case Study - Scotiabank

Delivering enhanced savings and benefits

Summary

Scotiabank HR shared services sets out to free the time of front-line bank staff to focus on the external customer.

In this case study HR senior vice-president shared services, Shirley Fudge explains how customer-centricity was installed into shared services and why it opted for a partly virtual functional configuration.

Background

Toronto, Canada, headquartered Scotiabank has a corporate vision: "To be the best at helping customers become financially better off by providing relevant solutions to their unique needs."

To realise this vision, the 49,000 employee-strong global financial services provider has, over recent years expended substantial energy in placing the customer at the centre of its world. At the turn of the millennium, it launched a customer focused strategy that required substantial restructuring of the management layers, a redesign of the sales and service processes, wide-scale installation of new customer-facing technology and an overhaul of the performance management and measurement systems. It paid off: in both 2001 and 2002 Scotiabank was rated the number one bank in Canada for overall quality of customer service, according to a customer service index compiled by the US-based market research company, Market Facts.

The strategic drive to customer centricity led directly to the setting up of shared services organization within the Domestic Banking Division (with about 27,5000 and about 1,000 branches in Canada this is the largest of Scotiabank's core businesses). Shirley Fudge, senior vice-president, HR shared services explains:

"Shared services came into being because we wanted to free up the time of front-line managers and staff to focus on the external customer. To do this we set out to remove all of the service delivery transaction and unrelated customer points of activities from our branch system."

In short, there was a direct line-of-sight from the rationale for setting up the shared services organization to Scotiabank's strategic objectives.

Such is the scope of shared services within the bank that it houses about 2,500 employees. The HR shared services segment has about 160 employees. The following section describes the overall structure of HR at the bank.

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