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ACBA - Credit Agricole Bank

Creating an effective global home for ideas

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ACBA logo

Founded in 1996, ACBA – CREDIT AGRICOLE is a universal bank that promotes financial inclusion in Armenia. It delivers innovative and efficient financial solutions with a strong focus on rural communities and works hard to solve customer and business challenges.

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350

ideas in under 2 years

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43

approved ideas, with 29 fully implemented

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1,115

employees on the platform

The background: enhancing collaborative knowledge sharing

With 1,500 employees spread across the country, ACBA needed a way to break down silos within the bank while shifting to a culture of collaborative knowledge sharing. The bank had two main goals: to improve processes and daily working life, and develop new products and services for customers.

ACBA wanted to encourage its geographically diverse workforce to think outside the box to solve customer and business solutions. The company didn’t have anything in place to capture ideas, apart from an intranet for staff to post suggestions. ACBA found that they didn’t get much engagement and the whole process wasn’t managed effectively. A new approach was needed.

The solution: creating a culture of innovation

ACBA turned to Wazoku’s idea management platform to help achieve their goals. They worked closely with our customer excellence team to fully onboard the platform and encourage staff engagement. ACBA put in place a full internal communications strategy, and had a launch strategy and plan to help staff understand the business benefits of the platform.

Reward and recognition

One of the first steps ACBA took, to help launch the platform and secure employee engagement from the start, was to use IdeaLab to run a challenge asking staff how they wanted to be rewarded for contributing ideas and helping to solve challenges. Overwhelmingly, the staff at ACBA wanted the opportunity to have lunch with the CEO, Hakob Andreasyan, and receive recognition right from the top. Since then, the CEO has been actively involved in the ideas management process, regularly blogging and providing updates on the platform homepage, as well as running an ongoing ‘Ask the CEO’ challenge and handing out rewards throughout the year.

“When we implemented our own fully branded platform, IdeaLab, we were expecting to generate and solve big challenges but actually we’re finding the small, incremental changes are having the most impact. We’ve solved some fantastic customer challenges but what we are most proud of, is we’ve been able to build a culture of engagement and trust, helping employees to feel much more invested and engaged in the future of the business.”

Project Management, Strategy Development and Innovation Team

Outcomes & tips

One of the Challenges ACBA ran was to help local businesses accept American Express as a form of payment. At the time of writing, they’ve installed 25 POS terminals in just a few short months, helping local businesses to profit while generating a revenue contribution for the bank.

Top three tips from ACBA

If you’re thinking of implementing an idea management platform, like Wazoku’s, here are the three top tips from ACBA’s Chief Specialist of Project Management, Aharon Santrosyan:

  • Have a good strategy and plan in place, complete with objectives, commitment and resources outlined, before going ahead
  • Ensure you have CEO and senior management engagement from the start – the CEO can create a culture of innovation from the top down
  • Encourage cross-functional collaboration with a communications plan to explain, onboard and drive engagement. It’s important to obtain buy-in early!

ACBA’S Innovation Community

External stakeholders

ACBA regularly works with local businesses and hopes to co-create with universities in the future. The platform will easily enable the organisation to do this by inviting them to join co-creation communities within the platform.

CEO

ACBA’s CEO manages a blog on the homepage to keep an open line with staff, where employees can have direct conversations with him – and IdeaLab is the first link he opens in his web browser. His always-on engagement with the programme shows the business how valuable and instrumental sharing insight and ideas is.

Innovation team

The innovation team are focused solely on helping the business to run challenges. They’re good at identifying employee reward and recognition that works and running business improvement challenges.

Employees

ACBA’s employees are an essential part of the whole process. Though initially hesitant, they have now generated over 350 ideas in under two years, spurred on by senior managers being active and present on the platform to provide regular engagement and recognition. IdeaLab has helped connect branch staff (who are geographically dispersed) with those at head office.

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