It’s our privilege to honor financial services customers who are driving transformation and reimagining how their future works. Read on to learn this year’s category winners for the Workday Industry Innovation Awards.
In this article, we discuss:
At Workday, we value our growing and inspiring financial services community where customers collaborate, innovate, and share best practices with each other.
To celebrate this community’s achievements, we’re delighted to share the 2023 winners of the first annual Workday Financial Services Innovation Awards. Announced at Workday Rising, our flagship customer event, these awards honor customers who continuously cultivate improvements across their organizations, support and empower their peers, and advance the industry.
“Our customers’ commitment to innovation amazes us—and we want to recognize that,” says Andrew Hamilton, vice president of services industry at Workday. “Our winners are not only helping their own organizations increase agility and resilience, they’re also ensuring long-term transformation.”
Without further ado, here are the stories behind our Workday Financial Services Innovation Award winners.
Vanguard is a registered investment advisor based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, with about $7.7 trillion in global assets under management. Just over a year ago, Vanguard underwent a global talent acquisition modernization to help make the recruiting process seamless for candidates, recruiters, recruiting coordinators, and hiring managers.
The changing talent landscape over the last three years drove this initiative and presented an opportunity to renew a focus on both acquiring talent and internal mobility. Vanguard’s leadership wanted to change the end-to-end recruiting process and unify their recruiting model to create a scalable, more efficient and flexible process.
“We were able to create dynamic dashboards in Workday with key efficiency measures,” says Tamara Tyree, global talent acquisition enablement lead for Vanguard. “We have implemented a beautiful platform enabled with Workday data where at any stage in the process, recruiters can see where there might be friction points and how we can help them move through the process faster.”
Among the key changes that Vanguard made:
Historically, Vanguard had different recruiters for internal mobility and external hiring initiatives. It brought those roles together and now every recruiter focuses on both types of work, which makes a single point of contact for hiring managers.
The organization implemented a simplified start job requisition form, which enables managers to create a requisition in under three minutes. It also helps hiring managers and recruiters have more efficient and effective intake meetings that provide clarity on the desired candidate.
Vanguard empowered hiring managers with the right access to eliminate rework and inefficiencies. The company could ensure that recruiters had the time to spend with the candidates, and then advance them to the manager for review when it was the right time in the process.
Recruiters could use Workday job requisition notes, which provide quick note-taking right in the job requisition and eliminate the need for any offline tracking of conversations or guidance from the hiring managers.
The team leveraged the web conference integration provided by Workday that interfaces with applications such as Microsoft Outlook and automates the virtual interview scheduling process. This helped to ensure the accuracy of links and eliminate any risk.
“Our success shouldn’t be measured by the number of things that we’ve actually done, but instead, the value that we’ve provided to the business,” says Thomas Moore, Workday Recruiting module product owner. “The key to our success throughout this entire process has been in listening and truly understanding the problem that needs solving. And then matching that to the Workday capability.”
“With all of these improvements, we have cut down our initial run from eight and a half hours to five hours.”
Saritha Yanala
Senior Software Engineering Manager
Fannie Mae
Fannie Mae buys and holds mortgages, and issues and sells guaranteed mortgage-backed securities to facilitate housing ownership for low- to middle-income Americans. The company was chartered by the United States Congress, but went public in 1970.
A few years ago, Fannie Mae recognized that its single-family loan accounting system was experiencing constraints. Its end-to-end execution of its full data volume took 10 hours. And because the company needed to process the data all at once, the execution process was limited to only once a month.
The biggest challenge was the volume of data Fannie Mae processed, especially in its single-family loan accounting system. It processed 250 million journal requests and up to 1 billion balances monthly.
“It proved to be very costly,” says Saritha Yanala, senior software engineering manager at Fannie Mae. “We didn’t have a consistent execution time and lacked flexibility.”
The solution was an enhanced Workday Prism Analytics data model to enable incremental activity and the introduction of execution groups in orchestration processes to speed up the end-to-end execution.
At a high level, Fannie Mae implemented parallel processing among the groups. And this supports delta processing so the team can run the static data once and not have to repeat it every time. Fannie Mae also added single execution for static data and critical path identification for each group.
“With all of these improvements, we have cut down our initial run from eight and a half hours to five hours,” says Yanala. “In the subsequent run, which is basically our delta processing, it now only takes three hours. This is a huge improvement, and very well received by our business. Not only does this get us very close to our goal of daily accounting, but it’s also a huge win for our organization.”
Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Huntington Bank is a $187 billion asset regional bank. Founded in 1866, Huntington operates more than 1,000 branches in 11 states. Through an initiative called Colleague Occupancy, Huntington wanted to gain visibility into when colleagues were coming into the office.
The company first pulled a rudimentary report from its badging system, but it only showed when colleagues swiped into the office. The team needed more information, such as when its colleagues are on paid time off or work schedules for hybrid workers.
Huntington used Workday Prism Analytics to create a dashboard that 20,000 employees now use. This dashboard shows the percentage of time hybrid colleagues are in the office over the last four weeks, as well as individual weeks.
To get this percentage, the calculation excludes holidays, paid time off, and leaves of absence. It also only includes full-time colleagues and excludes branch colleagues who are in the office every day.
In Workday Prism Analytics, Huntington combined data outside its system, such as card swipe data, with Workday data. The team created two dashboards: one for executive leaders and one for team managers. The dashboards provide visibility and efficiency.
“It’s a better report because we’re using it through Workday,” says Abigail Dyer, senior business analyst at Huntington. “It’s completely automated and there’s no manual intervention. We don’t have to copy and paste information, piece it together, and complete any calculations, which is a huge time saver.”
TIAA is a Fortune 100 financial services organization that’s a private provider of financial retirement services in the academic, research, medical, cultural, and governmental fields. TIAA serves more than 5 million active and retired employees participating at more than 15,000 institutions, and has $1 trillion in combined assets under management.
TIAA has implemented multiple Workday products, but recently used Workday Extend on an initiative called Skills of the Future. The organization identified that the skills required to perform a certain job function evolved every two to three years. As there’s an ongoing need to reskill workers to meet current and future business demands, TIAA decided to move toward becoming a skills-based organization.
The idea was to place skills and human capabilities at the heart of the company. In a skills-based organization, people have more clarity on the most important skills required to perform their job function. And it sets clear expectations and provides an expanded range of job opportunities.
TIAA needed a proficiency-based rating system. Then it could add those proficiency levels to the skills assigned to the job profiles. The company also determined the minimum proficiency that’s required to perform that particular job.
Employees then had the ability to view their job profile’s skills assessment results based on their own ratings and their manager’s. They can also view the job profile skills of anyone within the organization. If an employee was interested in another job, they could review the required skills to upskill themselves.
With this Workday Extend app, managers could assess their employee on each job-related skill and add comments. This is valuable to managers, as they can have an informed discussion with their direct reports, and create a development plan to address gaps in required skills.
“They have begun assessing themselves, and we have received feedback that the application is seamless and easy to use,” says Aashish Saini, Workday lead at TIAA. “It’s just overall positive feedback from an employee experience perspective.”
Workday is committed to helping our financial services customers try new Workday solutions and ultimately drive innovation.
“Our goal is to foster creativity in our customers to innovate beyond the Workday platform," says Hamilton. “The partnerships that we have created in this industry are paramount to the continued success of our customers as they look to deliver successfully. We look forward to seeing even more submissions in 2024, as we continue to grow the financial services community.”
Congratulations to the winners, and thank you to all our financial services customers for your continued commitment to Workday. We are excited to see all the innovative work next year.
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