How Sana helped Ebury make learning fun, while streamlining and scaling its complex training efforts
by Fabian Sanchis, Commercial Learning & Development Manager @ Ebury
3 hours vs. 3 weeks
How long it takes to create content now vs. old platform
98%
Completion rate for regulatory courses
Challenge
Ebury has been growing rapidly and now has offices in 25 countries. But with a fragmented learning tech stack, files in multiple places—and the variety of different regulations and cultural requirements in each market—it was impossible to scale the training efforts it was impossible to scale their required training programs.
Outcome
Ebury now has one home for learning that speeds up content creation, boosts completion and engagement rates, helps them onboard new hires, and even meet regulatory requirements for training hours. Sana is a full end-to-end solution, and they’re finding new use cases every day.
“Sana transformed our entire approach to learning. We needed a powerful, end-to-end platform that would unite all of our L&D activities. It started as a solution just for the front office, but is now used for the entire company.”
Creating a sustainable and scalable home for learning
Ebury has been on an exciting growth journey for the last few years—expanding to 40 offices in 25 countries. That success has brought with it a unique set of challenges for our four-person Learning and Development team (L&D). We are responsible for a laundry list of needs: regulatory training, onboarding, employee engagement, communications, and 12 live events a year. And there were two key challenges we didn’t know how to fix.
The first challenge was how to unite a global workforce of 1,700 people with the same processes and training while still being able to customize it to the cultural and regulatory differences in each market. The second was that we’re in a regulated industry, which requires a lot of compliance and regulatory training. And each market has different rules.
Before we found Sana, we had a messy mix of Google calls; Drive folders; and learning materials, presentations, and outdated documents all over the place. All of these journeys were dependent on one human that knew what was happening in the department and where everything was. We used an education platform for compliance training. But it took weeks just to create one or two pieces of content. It was not sustainable.
We needed a powerful, end-to-end platform that would bring all of it together into one environment. Then we found Sana—and it transformed our approach to L&D. What started as a solution just for the front office sales department has become the learning platform for the entire company.
Speeding up content creation time by weeks
Before we picked Sana, I deep-dived into the world of learning tech and evaluated 27 other platform providers. I had a spreadsheet with my 20 operational requirements. Sana was the only one that ticked them all.
One of the biggest reasons I picked Sana was because it makes content creation so easy. The LMS platform we had been using before was not built to scale, and for a company growing as rapidly as ours, it was a no-go. It had an outdated content editor. It would take weeks to create one piece of content, and I might have up to 50 pieces of content to create—multiplied by each department.
Because of how long it took, we were delivering compliance training on UK regulatory requirements to everyone in the company. But it wasn’t relevant for other markets or areas of the business. We just had to make do with what we had.
Now we can harness our existing content to create new training programs. If I have good baseline content in a PDF, Sana’s AI transforms it into an interactive course in just a few minutes. It allows me to publish three courses in one day. In the old LMS, those courses would have taken me weeks. It took me almost one week just to figure out how to add a video to a course. I’ve gone from three weeks per piece to three hours per piece.
“Learning paths are my biggest use case. They empower managers to use learning as a tool to develop their team members.”
Scaling up training while building confidence and motivation
Sana helps us achieve more with less effort and time—and has transformed learning at Ebury. Learners like it because it's intuitive, fast, and beautiful. They save time and don’t feel they have to consume as much content as before. It’s also far more interactive, which creates engagement we’ve never seen before.
The Sana platform hosts all of our L&D activities—regulatory and compliance training programs, onboarding, role-specific training, product training, and policy sign-offs. And it allows us to offer a learning experience that builds confidence and motivation. We did the first launch of our regulatory courses in December and we had a 98% completion rate—compared with a 90% completion rate on the previous one.
We also use Sana Live, Sana’s interactive virtual classroom, to host our onboarding sessions for new hires. It allows us to do in-person group learning with a big push—in one interactive platform.
The overwhelming feedback from the company is that completing compliance or regulatory training is a much better experience. And since we can build all of the content in-house, it’s tailored and targeted to the right people and departments. With Sana, we have so many ways to automate and scale the learning process.
Meeting regulatory requirements with data
Ebury is regulated in more than 25 countries, so there is a variety of compliance training and requirements we need to adhere to. We used our previous platform for compliance training, but managers couldn’t see whether their teams were completing the required training. They would only receive automated emails that someone had interacted with the training material, but not data on how much time they spent on it or whether they completed it.
Now with Sana, managers can see who completed the courses, and track exactly how many hours are spent on training. We can then provide the regulatory bodies with the data on our investment in learning. As a regulated business, having that kind of visibility is fundamental. And Sana is helping us meet a lot of our regulatory requirements for various countries.
Improving performance with tailored learning paths
One of our most-used features is Paths, where we can arrange courses and content sequentially, so it’s easy for learners to understand in which order they should consume the material. I use Paths often because it’s a slick way of bundling courses and content together. For example, a colleague asked for training videos on a specific topic, and it took five minutes to create and assign him a Path.
Now we’re shifting the use case and using Paths to tailor learning for individuals, so they can develop a specific competency or skill. My biggest use case for the feature has become showing managers how to use Paths to boost performance and to use learning as a tool to develop their team members. The managers can then take ownership of this effort through Insights, which allows them to create their own dashboards with the metrics that matter to them—like knowledge assessment scores and learner engagement. In the future, we also plan to track the impact of our learning initiatives on sales performance and customer satisfaction rates.
Transforming L&D with one central hub
I live in Sana 24/7. Sana is the only thing I do. But now it’s time I spend joyfully because it makes my administrative life a lot easier, and helps me achieve more with less time. It's also less effort because of the automations and AI. For every new activity I do, I now think: how can I do it through Sana?
I’ve never worked with a tech provider that makes changes so quickly and is so receptive to feedback. Either Sana takes my feedback and takes action right away, or they’ve already solved it and they show me the solution. Sometimes I just log in and can't wait to find out what's new in Sana.
In the future, Sana will be our central learning hub. With all of the engagement throughout the organization, and with what we’ve achieved already, we’re reaching our vision of creating a seamless training experience. And in the process, we’re transforming our approach to learning at Ebury.