Barclays

Ross Surace, Senior Technology Partner at Head Office Functions & Colleague Collaboration Delivery, Barclays Bank plc Ross Surace: I think when you look at the feedback about Diligent as a product and the service that Diligent deliver, our directors absolutely love Diligent. In fact they love Diligent so much they continue to push us hard to roll the product out across the rest of the bank. [Intro music – relatively upbeat] With Diligent originally it was very much for the Barclays board. Of course when the Barclays board saw the product very quickly the board audit committee wanted it, then after that, you know, the remuneration community wanted it. All of a sudden the tool went from being used by ten people to almost 150 people... Today the growth and the experience that the product has delivered to Barclays, we now have 454 users in the bank I think Barclays in its journey to become the go to bank has really realised and it understands that technology is the power. It’s the generator behind us becoming that go to bank. I think for me Diligent is more about an experience rather than a tool. So the way we look at Diligent is yes it’s removed many, many thousands of pounds of costs from the organisation, but it’s the experience that it’s really driven for the director. So the director now can have the papers on the go, they can edit the papers where they want to . It enables so many efficiencies from a processing perspective that now driving a meeting becomes so much more effective, so much more of a rich experience that it enables the director to think and really use the tool to help them make the right decisions rather than focus on worrying about do I have the right papers. So it’s enabled them to have a lot more control over how they drive those meetings. I think for me Diligent is very important because of time. So what Diligent does is it – not only does it remove a manual process and a lot of heavy lifting, what it actually generates is the freedom for the director to have more time because in essence you can take those papers wherever you go. You have the absolute secure control and the power to do what you want, when you want. So for me time is the biggest thing that it enables. What Diligent does is it puts the customer, it puts the director, puts the colleague right to the center of how they’ve designed it. So in essence, if you give them a stylist and you give them an iPad, it actually very little differs to using a pen and a paper. And I think again that’s where the simplicity and the power of Diligent really comes into its own. It is not only a product that adds value through the processing, but actually it’s a product that you can use while you’re out on the go on your iPad, and I think in today’s modern world where we are very much in an app genre I think, you know, what Diligent does, it really plays in that sweet spot. So directors love Diligent in Barclays and that’s a fact. so we have our CEO of Barclaycard, Val Serena Keating they showcased the product at the meeting. There was 20 people in this room and their kind of mouths dropped, saying “Right, how do we get this?” So as you can imagine my phone was flooded with senior people saying “Ross, when can we have this product? We want it now.” So for me you get a lot of those sorts of anecdotes in Barclays where people don’t even know that we’ve got the tool because it is used very much at the top level. We very much feel like we get that Mercedes, that BMW level of service. That’s what we pay for, but actually that’s what we get. And for us that’s why the product is so successful in Barclays. I think the power in Diligent is in its simplicity. You know, for me, what I really like is the fact that, you know, with very little training the director can almost self-teach. It is that easy to use. So we obviously provide a suite of training for the directors and their PAs, but actually what you tend to find is the director, they want to be left alone to play. For them it’s like a new cool app they’ve just been given. Leave me with it. I wanna go and enjoy it. I wanna learn how to use it myself. And of course, you know, each director uses it in a very consistent way, but they all find different ways to get the very best out of it, and that’s what I really love about Diligent...