SEB by the numbers
1856
Founded in 1856
Stockholm, Sweden
Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden
20+ countries
Presence in 20+ countries
18,000
Around 18,000 employees
The challenge
Keeping teams up-to-date on today’s tech
Advanced technologies like AI and cloud have transformed the banking and financial industries, but they’ve also led to an increase in cyber threats and security risk. Financial institutions need to build digital awareness across the organization if they want to continue to create innovative products and services for their customers.
With a focus on delivering convenient and secure experiences for its customers, SEB aimed to maintain its position as a leading open banking and tech company in Sweden. To achieve this goal—and as one of Sweden’s largest tech employers—SEB teams needed to stay up-to-date on how to leverage today’s tech in the workplace, especially the cloud.
To accomplish this, they needed to move their legacy systems to a cloud environment to stay on the cutting edge and provide upskilling opportunities so team members could effectively and securely leverage cloud technology.
SEB also wanted to raise digital awareness in cloud and cybersecurity in technical and non-technical roles across the organization. The company was looking for training that allowed technologists to obtain a deeper level of learning through hands-on experiences and empowered business teams to become more tech fluent.
Being a bank, especially within the technology space, you need to be highly skilled. What we can support our employees with is the opportunity to continue to train and learn. If you want to solve a problem, you need to use the latest and greatest to do so.
Petra Alund
CTO and Head of Technology
The solution
Developing individual proficiencies
SEB partnered with Pluralsight to address these challenges and provide extensive training for technical and business teams. What began as an initiative to offer upskilling content to some of its technical teams has evolved into a key component of SEB’s overall success.
Technical teams are now using expert-led content to close critical skills gaps in cloud and cybersecurity. The partnership empowers team members to practice and fine-tune new skills through hands-on labs and sandboxes—without compromising current data or security controls or putting business operations at risk.
Non-technical teams are tapping into Tech Foundations to become fluent in today’s top technologies. In fact, SEB leveraged Tech Foundations to achieve higher levels of digital awareness, leading to fulfillment of technical roles internally and saving up to 1 million kroner on each role filled.
Senior leadership is diving into robust features, like skill assessments and analytics, to boost proficiency. Managers and team members use Skill IQ to identify knowledge gaps and strengths and get tailored learning recommendations. In fact, SEB used Pluralsight to drive engagement on Google Cloud Digital Leader training, leveraging one of the most popular Skill IQs within SEB (called Google Cloud Foundations). Plus, the in-depth assessments enable leadership to better align upskilling with strategic initiatives and fill critical roles with current talent.
Finally, SEB’s user and usage analytics track aggregated activity on Skills, showing where team members spend time and what they accomplish as part of the company’s mandated learning goal of 42+ hours per year. Additionally, SEB has leveraged Pluralsight’s APIs in Tableau to surface relevant data into visualizations for SEB’s senior leadership.
When I started at SEB three years ago, we were not as proactive in learning possibilities within tech. However, after partnering with Pluralsight, I clearly see people embracing and understanding the need to proactively self-drive their learning needs.
Colm Fadden
Learning & Development Manager
Next steps
Delivering the best possible customer experience
SEB will continue to focus on its transformation from legacy systems to a cloud-centric operation as the organization creates future-ready teams and sets itself up for success. The company will leverage Pluralsight in its upskilling initiatives so it can develop and strengthen its APIs, improve security across the organization, outperform competitors, and deliver the best possible customer experiences.
Going forward, SEB will ensure its workforce has the digital savvy to improve organizational functionality and utilize real-time data more effectively. Team members will use SEB’s innovative AI tools to incorporate data from a variety of sources and provide expert guidance to customers so those customers can achieve financial success.
What does success look like? You can see it from many different perspectives. But what we are most happy and proud of is when we create a new product that we know gets traction on the market. The customers love it.
Petra Alund
CTO and Head of Technology
