Following numerous acquisitions and mergers, Sberbank faced an unprecedented challenge and opportunity to transform itself into a unique and diversified financial institution. With its employee base increasing and new cultures joining the bank, the goal was to find a way to easily train managers and personnel while increasing collaboration and crowd sourcing to spread best practices. Sberbank created the Virtual School of Sberbank and selected Saba’s modern learning platform based on its ability to meet key criteria such as ability to scale, visual usability, extended testing functionality, and accessibility from anywhere at any time. The Virtual School of Sberbank is planned for an initial three-phased rollout during 2013.

The first phase was implemented in January to 1,500 managers who are using Saba’s learning-management system, webinars, and base-testing functionality to interact with each other across various locations and to study via eLearning courses to increase their competency level. Today, the Virtual School of Sberbank gives access to 54 online courses, with new classes introduced on an ongoing basis.

"In the first few months since rollout, we’ve seen increased access to learning and development programs and across a range of regions and acquired companies," said Andrey A. Leushev, vice president of the Innovative Products Department at Sberbank. "We can already see how the usability, scalability, and flexibility of Saba’s learning platform will enable us to develop our people in ways that we couldn’t before, thus helping make our teams more agile, current, and efficient. We’ve provided an initial group of management with learning courses and compliance training and look forward to the next phase of the rollout this summer."

Sberbank’s plans for this summer rollout are to extend access to the Virtual School of Sberbank to more than 20,000 management-level employees. The goals of this second phase will be to form a unique knowledge base, provide usage of a single standards model, spread and scale best business practices, and to set up and launch a new, unified corporate culture. The last phase of the initial rollout is scheduled for December.

"Saba is pleased to have the opportunity to meet the needs of Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank," said Leo Hanna, senior vice president and general manager, EMEA at Saba. "Our people-centric learning platform is enabling them to scale across branches and geographies to provide their employees with numerous new kinds of people development opportunities. We’re excited about our continued work with Sberbank, as it leverages our robust solution to accelerate its workforce transformation through the use of formal and informal learning and training programs."