Financial Compliance Made Easier: Smarter Learning Content Strategies

The finance and banking industry is one of the most highly regulated, giving customers peace of mind. With both customer and business finances at stake, mandatory regulatory training is a top priority for L&D teams. No financial organization wants to risk fines or damage its hard-earned reputation, making effective compliance training essential.

‍

We hosted a webinar with Leslie Ropelato at Discover, and Wayne Conley and Rick At Lee from Truist to talk about how they ensure compliance and bulletproof regulatory practices, and how and how with how working with dominKnow has changed the way they handle the creation and delivery of mandatory learning content.

‍

If you missed the live webinar, you can watch the on-demand recording, or read on for the highlights of our conversation.

Ensuring compliance in the fast-evolving financial industry

The finance industry is constantly changing, and it’s up to organizations to ensure that they’re up to speed with the latest rules and regulations. This requires constant upskilling to keep banking employees equipped with the latest insights and best practices. The rules change fast, so it’s important that finance organizations have the right tools in place to keep up.

‍

For Discover, this means rolling out quick, short-term, on-the-go learning to keep employees up to date with the complexities of the regulatory environment in today’s banking industry. This gives employees the tools, knowledge, and skills needed to perform their duties competently while still complying with the latest policies and procedures – a must for any financial organization.

Smooth content creation with dominKnow | ONE

Before working with dominKnow | ONE, Discover’s content process revolved around standard eLearning courses such as Articulate, PowerPoints, participant guides and leader guides for both self-paced and in-person sessions. This was supplemented with job aids and other materials for use in the classroom.

‍

Leslie said that transitioning legacy content into dominKnow | ONE has been “a remarkable transformation,” which has made the entire content creation process much smoother, faster, and more consistent across the entire organization. It’s also made it easier to introduce assets like interactive software simulations into the learning program, which can be slotted into courses or accessed as standalone, refresher assets.

‍

‍

‍

dominKnow | ONE has enabled agile design processes, where multiple learning designers can collaborate on and edit projects. Previously, each designer would own a project, with little collaboration, whereas the flexibility of dominKnow | ONE allows designers to work together to enhance the quality of learning content, as well as streamlining the feedback and review processes.

Minimizing risk through single-source learning content

With a web-based learning content management system (LCMS) like dominKnow, there’s no need to move source files around. Instead, designers can create content once, then distribute it across multiple locations at the touch of a button, with no need to edit source files, reupload them, and chase down old versions. Edits, reviews, and collaboration can be done in real time in the same files, ensuring there are no longer multiple versions of the same source files or assets – everything is consolidated in one place.

‍

This is particularly important for high-stakes content such as regulatory training in the finance industry. Getting mandatory compliance training right is of paramount importance, and the more versions of the source files, the higher the risk that the wrong information will slip through the cracks. Single-source learning content helps minimize those risks by keeping all edits and all reviews in one place for easy content management.

‍

Publishing content at the speed of need

Distributing at speed is another key aspect to Discover’s success. Leslie also shared how dominKnow’s Convey dynamic publishing service helps Discover create and deliver formal learning at the point of need. Instead of having to track down all instances of a course, Leslie and her team can take advantage of single sourcing to make updates once, and push them out everywhere simultaneously. “dominKnow Convey has been a total game changer. It saves us precious design time in the initial creation, but also in making quick updates. There’s no more redundant work – we can just do it once, with one edit across all relevant courses.”

‍

Discover’s ability to maximize the speedy distribution of updates has been maximized in two areas. The first was with the boost received with the use of Distributing updates Discover began to leverage also uses dominKnow’s learning object reuse capabilities. Providing the ability to have key content elements appear in multiple formats for different audiences has led to able to utilize function for a frictionless maintenance process to ensuringe that learners have the latest content as soon as possible. For instance, if a piece of content is available in nine courses, Leslie and her team can update the source content once, and push it out to every course at the same time. In Discover’s content library, some assets are used over 100 times across courses, so single sourcing dramatically increases the makes it much more efficiencyefficient of to makinge updates and edits for regulatory changes.

‍

Once the content has been updated, the second part of the puzzle is “How do we get the updated content to learners as quickly as we made the changes?” – and that’s where Convey’s seamless content deployment comes in. With Convey, Discover doesn't need to involve its LMS administrators to publish new content. Instead, content can be published directly from Convey, with no need to deal with reuploading SCORM packages or getting other people involved.

Streamlining content creation with templates

‍

Leslie, Rick, and Wayne all agree that templates are a highly effective way to streamline learning content creation. At Discover, Leslie’s team created templates for job skill micro-deliverables and curated skill-based content, which could be packaged up and delivered at scale. Within six months, they created over 200 job skill microlearning deliverables, supporting busy banking employees with short, sharp learning content that slotted into their tight schedules.

‍

Alongside managing branding and accessibility, Truist also uses templates for gamified experiences. For example, Truist offers a gamified code of ethics activity, where learners answer questions about different scenarios to score points. Truist then uses dominKnow’s built in action and design elements supplementing some items with along with uses HTML5, JavaScript and, HTML widgets. Using , and dominKnow’s APIs the templates can to refer back to the reusable widgets later in the course – for instance, using the API the content can provide learners with information on their recall how someone performance performed in the gamified code of ethics activity and affect what information the course communicates based on those results.. AThis is all of the this is templated, so it makes it quick and easy for any team member to replicate across multiple courses.

Choosing the right software to create and manage learning content

For Truist, choosing the right software was essential for streamlining its content creation processes. Truist was created following the merger of two banking groups, each with its own L&D team. One of the existing teams had its own legacy LCMS, and the other used a standalone authoring tool.

‍

The newly merged Truist team wanted the flexibility of a standalone authoring tool, with the robust learning management benefits of an LCMS. When the Truist team found dominKnow | ONE, the decision to adopt it for its learning content management was a no brainer.

‍

‍

‍

Prior to using dominKnow, there was a very extensive process in place to get content updates made on the LMS, with even simple typos taking up to two weeks to correct. Of course, these lengthy processes weren’t ideal for business-critical compliance content, so the ability to cut this process from weeks to seconds with dominKnow | ONE and Convey is hugely beneficial for the Truist L&D team.

Maintaining control of learning content with an extended team of authors

Where regulatory training is concerned, maintaining control of the information in courses is vital. But for a large banking group like Truist, it’s impossible for a central L&D team to create all learning content at the speed of need. With dominKnow | ONE, Truist’s L&D team can give line of business practitioners the power to create content for their teams directly, whether that’s job aids, Virtual ILT materials, or simulations, while the central L&D team retains overall control and oversight of the content standards, whether that’s branding or accessibility.

‍

Standalone authoring tools don’t give the central team enough visibility into the quality of the content. But dominKnow | ONE’s templates, collaboration, and review workflows make it simple for the central team to ensure the quality and consistency of all learning content. 

‍

With dominKnow | ONE, Truist can trust that no matter how many SMEs are involved in content creation, every single learning course or asset will reach its quality standards, without the back-and-forth involved in traditional content authoring.

Tightening up learning content version control

A major consideration for Truist’s L&D team is the need to retain every version of its learning content for a set period of time to comply with industry regulations. With many tools, this would be challenging, as files are updated and replaced, making it tricky to keep track of older versions of assets.

‍

Instead, dominKnow allows Truist to tag content for various life cycle steps, manage it  through different versions of its learning content, and safely archive older versions for any legal or regulatory requests.

‍

‍

‍

Rapid, one-click course maintenance

Truist uses dominKnow Convey for one-click publishing for both formal and informal content. With Convey, Truist can use a “SCORM stub” to publish content to a URL, which stays the same no matter how many times learning content is updated. 

‍

This replaces the tedious process of replacing full SCORM files. Instead of removing the old file from the LMS, making the edits, and uploading the new version back to the LMS (and everywhere else it’s published), the SCORM stub means that the content is automatically updated at the click of a button. The SCORM stub files can also be sent via email, making them much more convenient than large SCORM files, which must be shared from a storage area, which can quickly become laborious and time consuming.

‍

Switching to one-click publishing has reduced the risk of outdated information for Discover and Truist. When updates require SME input, approval, and LMS uploads, content stays inaccurate during the wait. One-click publishing is the icing on the cake, enabling lets financial organizations to quickly update, approve, and publish their contentquickly, ensuring accurate content with less risk.

‍

Want to know how financial organizations can streamline their regulatory content processes? Get your dominKnow demo today to see our solution in action.