How Viva Wallet cuts through the chaos of rapid growth by automating their Onboarding and Performance cycles

Viva Wallet is the first Pan-European, entirely cloud-based Neobank. Providing localized payment and credit services to businesses across 23 European countries, Viva Wallet's vision is to change the way businesses pay and get paid. Over a 20 year journey they've disrupted the fragmented financial ecosystem in Europe and the UK and are setting out to create a truly unified European payments system which allows their customers to go global, while remaining local. Through innovative technology, personalization and investment, Viva has become one of the most exciting FinTech startups in Europe, leading this groundbreaking change in banking services from their headquarters in Greece.

We spoke with Eirini Vitoratou - HR Business Partner, about Viva Wallet's journey from paper-based HR to a fully digital, automated software solution with PeopleGoal.

The Challenge: Digitizing HR to support phenomenal business growth

Viva Wallet was (and still is!) rapidly growing in terms of headcount, increasing by 25% in just one quarter. This was an incredibly difficult process to handle with a paper-based approach, and it wasn't only performance management that needed to be streamlined, but other core HR processes to support the expansion, too. Says Eirini:

As a FinTech company, we are totally paperless. We need to have things automated. What triggered our decision to obtain a software solution is how we conducted, until then, the Performance Evaluation.

Viva Wallet's evaluations had become an admin burden: a time-consuming effort from HR and managers that gave little visibility into performance and struggled to keep employees on track with the business strategy.

We needed to have somewhere to keep the evaluations all together, in one place. To take evaluations per employee, from their manager, from their peers, and run a bottom to top assessment. We also needed to keep a file to follow up on the evaluations, to see the progress that every individual had or to proceed with other action.

New joiners needed a framework to hit the ground running

With eight offices across Europe and new talent joining their exciting business every day, another challenge was how to give new hires the best start possible while remote working.

Despite the COVID period, we stuck to our business plan and we have opened offices in around seven to eight countries. Being at headquarters, it's hard to keep communicating and be in direct contact with our employees across Europe.

When growing at such a rapid pace, a must-have for Viva Wallet was the ability to create a coherent onboarding process for all employees that could be automated as much as possible, giving a consistent framework for every new team member without being admin-heavy for HR.

The Solution: PeopleGoal's Performance and Onboarding Apps

Viva Wallet engaged PeopleGoal's Performance solutions to digitize and streamline their evaluations.

Your expertise triggered our decision to go with PeopleGoal. We found the tool user-friendly from the employee perspective as well as for admins. It's a completely straightforward procedure. We have goal-setting, monthly evaluations and quarterly evaluations. We have achieved our main purpose for managers to be able to evaluate people and for people to get that feedback, and to have this stored in one place in the app. The feedback on the way that PeopleGoal works has been very positive.

They quickly realized PeopleGoal's capabilities in the Onboarding process, too. By setting up a new hire checklist, employee resources and a new joiner survey from our app store templates, Eirini and the Global HR team has seen amazing results:

It's our way to communicate with our people who are not in the headquarters. We're located in Greece while other employees are in other countries. To have all the information needed for a new employee in one place is very helpful. It's very interactive; the employee has the chance from his first week at work to interact with Viva through PeopleGoal.

Deep functionality, simple processes and integrations with team collaboration tools

Another key factor in making their new digital process a success was PeopleGoal's integration with other workforce tools.

The interaction with Microsoft Teams is very important because it's our main collaboration tool. We need any other app we decide to use to have the ability to integrate with Teams.

Through a simple connection with Viva Wallet's HR database, employee records are automatically kept in sync; and our integration with MS Teams keeps performance management in the day-to-day flow of work.

From the DevOps side the integration was smooth and easy to use, and we can now keep all of our information centralized.

Viva Wallet's Results: Automation, organization and accountability

PeopleGoal has become the framework for all performance conversations. By bringing together onboarding, performance and development, there's now a much-needed structure to the performance cycle and leaders gain insight into the growth of their organization. As Eirini puts it:

The single most valuable thing the product brings is digitizing our processes. Putting managers in the position of evaluating their direct reports monthly is a key factor in improving their performance. For managers and HR this is very helpful because we can proceed with any necessary action in regards to employees' career path within Viva.

For example, based on PeopleGoal, we can promote someone or advise if we want to get approval or suggest someone for a salary increase. Each team member is aware of their performance all the time. Along with their manager, they draw a plan so as to improve or to work more on a goal that may be left behind.

An easy-to-use tool for fast adoption

Navigating from paper-based to something very new and digital was a new experience for employees as well as HR. We saw amazing adoption and completion rates, with 98% of employees setting targets right from the first quarter. Says Eirini about the employee experience:

It was easy and friendly and they understood what they have to do. People weren't used to using software for performance evaluations or for onboarding, but now we're in a very good situation where everyone is feeling comfortable with the process.

Automating the process: the system does the work for you

Now, it's so much easier to handle all of the HR processes the team has created on PeopleGoal - for HR, employees, managers and leaders. By setting up app schedules, PeopleGoal automatically creates the Onboarding checklist for new hires, sends a new joiner survey 30 days after their hire date, and triggers the creation of all quarterly evaluations on fixed deadlines. Once the processes are underway, the availability of all data and our reporting tools allow Viva's team to see exactly how the needle is moving on performance.

When it comes to Onboarding, the value of this automation for a fast growing company - given a remote-working environment and COVID - is massive:

We use it as an induction training. It saves us from having to attend to many individual questions and requests the new employee may have and we're very happy that we have launched this Onboarding app. Employees get the relevant information they need to be smoothly onboarded and integrated into the company culture.

Seeing PeopleGoal as a key partner

Viva's HR team found the Customer Success resources to be a helping hand through a quick timeline to launch.

We had such a positive experience with implementation and support. You're a key partner for us. It was very helpful to have the training material you have, and the fact that the team was always there to support us.

Expressing Viva Wallet's company culture and core values through their tech

Taking a creative approach to the design of their Onboarding program has also allowed Viva Wallet to encompass their values around everything being digital, and the system feels like a part of their own ecosystem:

I believe this software can describe exactly what the company is. With the automated processes employees receive electronically through a friendly and interactive app; their induction, survey, evaluation; helps them to adapt more easily to our company culture from day one.

So how would things be now if Viva Wallet didn't have PeopleGoal today?