Building upon its expertise in meeting the unique needs of the financial services sector, SumTotal Systems, the industry’s largest provider of learning and business performance technologies, services and processes, today announced that Sovereign Bank, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sovereign Bancorp, Inc. (NYSE: SOV), and pro forma one of the 18 largest financial institutions in the US, has chosen the SumTotal Enterprise Suite to drive the creation of an enterprise-wide learning program for 9,500 employees in more than 650 Community Banking Offices (CBOs) across the Northeast.
In preparation for deploying a learning solution, Sovereign formed a cross-functional Learning Council to establish a company-wide learning strategy and evaluate tools and technologies that would support the bank’s learning and business goals. Significant growth and acquisitions over the past few years had made monitoring employee compliance with training requirements increasingly complex for Sovereign. The bank needed a corporate-wide approach to simplify tracking and reporting, as well as a way to automate legacy tracking and reporting processes, procedures and technologies that had required significant manual administration.
After an intensive search, Sovereign chose the SumTotal Enterprise Suite, including TotalLMS and TotalLCMS, as well as the Information Management, Collaboration and Personalized Delivery modules, to create a centralized portal that employees can use to access learning activities regardless of their locations. According to Randy Reardon, the senior leader of Sovereign’s Learning Council and senior vice president of leadership and organizational development for Sovereign Bank, the SumTotal solution best addressed a set of key outcomes the group had identified as critical to the success of its e-learning initiative, including the ability to:Accurately track and report employee learningGenerate higher ROI on learning resourcesTie learning to job performanceOffer equal opportunity for world-class learning to all team membersStandardize learning delivery and curriculum”From our very first interaction with SumTotal, our e-learning team was “wowed”. It is obvious to us that SumTotal has taken the time to learn our business and target solutions to meet Sovereign’s business needs,” said Randy Reardon. “SumTotal continually demonstrates that they are partnering with us to help us achieve our business objectives through their guidance and expertise.”
One of Sovereign’s objectives is to ensure that all team members across the organization have access to the same high-quality, standardized information and learning activities. Sovereign will use a hosted version of the SumTotal Suite to power the learning portal, which will deliver compliance, mergers and acquisitions and new hire training, online job aids and other learning and business performance activities, while also providing the flexibility to deliver training to team members in alignment with each location’s specific needs.
Sovereign also will use TotalLCMS to meet the organization’s high demand for learning content. TotalLCMS will help the bank efficiently create and deploy instructionally sound learning content to Sovereign team members and to standardize delivery of e-learning projects by creating pre-approved course templates.
“In a highly competitive industry, what makes a financial services company successful is its ability to capitalize on new revenue opportunities, manage and track regulatory compliance and ensure customer confidence and satisfaction,” said R. Andrew Eckert, SumTotal CEO. “With targeted technology and services solutions, we have helped numerous financial services companies address these complex issues through increased organizational proficiency and accreditation. We are pleased to help Sovereign meet its training mandates and provide employees with the knowledge and skills they need to continue offering their customers the Red Carpet ServiceSM for which the bank is known.”
