Creating a “Corporate University” for a Major Bank
Learn how BCG partnered with the CEO of a major European bank to develop the concept of a “corporate university.”
Our client is a worldwide bank headquartered in Europe, with a focus on private banking, investment banking, and asset management. It has operations in more than 50 countries, has more than 47,000 employees, and assets exceeding $1 trillion.
European Bank approached BCG for help with three specific objectives: develop the concept of a "corporate university," redesign its management development architecture, and support the design of curricula for its new corporate university campus in Asia.
Our case team worked with the client across three main pillars. First, we developed and set up a corporate university, with a focus these key areas:
Vision & Objectives—describing the corporate university's goals and management-sponsored mandates
Strategic Concept—to include content, target groups, organization and business cases (looking at the financial impact)
Program Architecture—following leadership and management development, functional and technical training, and cross-divisional training
Normative Fundamentals—designing policies, governance, processes, quality management, and partner and faculty management
Operational Platform—looking at reporting, technology, infrastructure, and communications and marketing
Then, we redesigned the management development architecture and helped in the redevelopment of the European Bank’s mission statement.
Finally, we supported the design of curricula and of an operational platform for a newly-opened corporate university campus in Asia. This work included transparency in regard to existing programs and budgets, a definition of a new advisor-training program, identification and motivation of staff as faculty, training of the faculty, design of a high-level curriculum for support staff and management development, and the development of an intranet site for the new training center.
BCG's leadership and learning center focused on four content areas: mind expansion, business insight, leadership behavior, and company norms and values.
All of these were delivered via a process of shared learning, experience, exposure, and self-discovery.
Our plan for a corporate university contained many recommendations to the client, among them:
Align the bank's educational activities in all three front departments in terms of target groups, content, and processes by leveraging best practices in all areas with the objective of centralizing all training programs.
Design a new training curriculum, and prepare the groundwork for the kick-off of this curriculum.
Develop a process solution to centralize expenditures for external education programs (which had previously been decentralized).
Define a new advisor-training program based on client needs and currently existing client-advisory processes.
Identify and motivate staff to become faculty, and then offer training for this new faculty.
In helping set up a corporate university, BCG impacted European Bank’s training model by:
Successfully centralizing course administration and managing the third party training budgets through the corporate university. Resources freed up as a result were invested in the development of new programs
Increasing budget funding by 50 percent (compared to earlier training activities)
Creating significant cost savings in the external education, approximately 15% of total budget in external, third party training due to better governance of these funds, and by decreasing the number of administration staff by 15%
Launching a training program for private banking advisors, with more than 100 participants in its first year