Metro Bank, the first new high street bank in over 100 years, announced its plan to revolutionise UK banking services both for private individuals and businesses earlier this year. Focusing on customer satisfaction the new bank aims to give a ‘better banking experience’ by providing stores that are open early until late, seven days a week and supported by 24 hour local call centres.
With four London stores already performing well, Metro Bank plans to open 40 stores by 2014 and over 200 stores by 2020. Such rapid expansion poses many challenges not least of which is establishing a robust and scalable HR function.
‘’Trust in traditional high street banks has been low for some time so for us to make a real difference and rebuild confidence our customer service has to be exceptional,” explains Metro Bank’s Chief Executive Officer, Craig Donaldson.
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“Staff morale and workplace efficiencies are highly important factors, both of which must be securely underpinned by an effective HR infrastructure as provided by Cascade.
Metro Bank is using Cascade’s core HR software, plus the timesheet, workflow and self service modules. All of which are being hosted via Cascade’s servers at separate geographical locations to ensure increased data resilience.
Cascade project manager Lee Harding said “This has been a fantastic project for Cascade for a number of reasons; because Metro Bank wants to bring about major change its corporate ethos is all about being receptive to new initiatives and this was reflected in the mindset of the staff. Everyone really got behind the installation which took just six weeks from our initial meeting through to project initiation, planning, data collation and integration.
‘’We work with some very large organisations but Metro Bank will be one of our most rapidly growing clients. Seeing just how flexible our browser-based system can be when future-proofing companies on this scale is wonderfully satisfying.’’
Cascade’s software is designed to cope with the huge onset of new staff expected. However to provide the highest possible levels of expansion consistency the two companies are working together to devise further risk reducing work flows. These will ensure that standardised HR processes are implemented accurately from the outset, rolled out from store to store and embraced by all employees using the self service tool.
“There are no technical limitations with Cascade,” concludes Craig Donaldson, “so the size of our 2020 network we will not be restricted by the software. Whether we have one or 100 new starters the process will be seamless.”
