Erste Bank group authorises IMC AG for group-wide CLIX roll-out

Erste Bank is the Austrian Sparkasse group‘s top financial institution, with independent subsidiaries in Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Romania. The Austrian Sparkasse group, SLSP and CSAS, Erste Bank´s Czech subsidiary, are all major players in banking in their respective countries.

The project‘s main target group include SLSP sales and marketing staff active in the areas of retail banking, corporate center and treasury. CLIX will also be supporting the learning careers of selected SLSP head office managers and other internal service team operators. Up to now, employees have received training in regional training centers strewn across Slovakia, expensive in terms of organizational and traveling costs, and also lost time. CLIX will be key in radically cutting these expenditures. 4,200 employees will already be benefiting from CLIX in this initial pilot phase, which, in 2006, will be expanded to connect up further users from outside Slovakia, more importantly the sAkademie, regional Austrian Sparkasse offices and also CSAS (Ceska sporitelna), the Czech subsidiary of Erste Bank.

The superior system configuration options provided by CLIX, presenting no barriers to integration in an SAP application landscape, plus the advantage of having a high-performance consulting and support organization available locally, tipped the decision in IMC’s favor against international competitors. Within the scope of the launch of CLIX, the focus is on supporting learning and content management, coupled with competence management, resource planning, and also extensive test and certification functionality.

Implementation of the interface to the SAP modules HR and TEM will be based on SAP- certificated CLIX integration architecture (CLIX2SAP) with the SAP Netweaver XI. CLIX2SAP is based on message-based services, thus enabling the interface to external systems at zero development cost.

„The most important factor in promoting the successful take-up of new and innovative financial products by the customer groups targeted is fast time-to-market. Achieving a faster time-to-market requires an acceleration in time-to-competency,“ explains Dr. Wolfgang Kraemer, board spokesperson at IMC AG. „Learning management systems are ideal for qualification scenarios of this nature. Further requirements in the domain of compliance are equally realizable via CLIX. Our long experience in the design and realization of learning management solutions for financial institutions, as gathered with UBS, Allianz or the Sparkasse Akademie in Germany, provide a solid foundation for successful implementation.“