Kuwait Finance House KSC : Microsoft social enterprise network “Yammer” gives faster and smarter ways for over 1500 employees at KFH to connect and collaborate across the Group

Kuwait Finance House (KFH), the world leading Islamic financial institution, announced the adoption of Microsoft social enterprise network, Yammer to increase collaboration and productivity amongst employees within the organization. This comes in line with the bank's mission to deliver superior innovation and customer enterprise network, while effectively increasing the level of employees' engagement and communication.

Yammer has taken collaboration to a whole new level at KFH, by transforming business operations and enabling employees to work together across the region without having to worry about systems, locations, and time zones. Starting with deploying Yammer for 200 employees, KFH went up to 1000 users in just 30 days. From branch employees to senior management, employees can now effectively collaborate on Yammer using both the internet and collaboration platform. Yammer provides a common portal, a single place, where employees can locate people, find help, and work in groups.

Group Chief Retail and Private Banking Officer, Waleed Mandani said that Yammer played a significant role in allowing KFH employees to know more about each other through their posts that mostly narrate special stories with their customers and colleagues, and to educate them about other colleagues' success stories and work nature. It also contributed in keeping lines of communication between the departments in the bank.

He continued 'Yammer allows the bank's employees to share ideas and offer comments and suggestions to improve the business irrespective to job titles and grades. The role of the senior and executive management in directly supervising and engaging with employees in Yammer contributed in shedding light on talented employees, and publicly recognizing their achievements. Yammer strongly reinforced the concept of 'KFH family'.

'Our vision is to lead the international development of Islamic financial services by becoming the most trusted, profitable and Islamic compliant bank in the world', added Mandani; KFH 'implementing Yammer brings us one step closer to our goal of expanding our services, enabling our employees to leverage a single platform that seamlessly connects people and information across the organization, making it easier to work smarter, and more efficient.'

'In today's globalized information economy, collaboration is more important than ever for driving business productivity', said Charles Nahas, Country General Manager Microsoft Kuwait. 'Yammer adds a best-in-class enterprise social networking service allowing organization like Kuwait Finance House to collaborate, manage information seamlessly and leverage the cloud to achieve more.'

Launched in 2008, Yammer is a leading enterprise social networking platform used by over 200,000 organizations worldwide, including 85 percent of the fortune 500, to foster team collaboration, empower employees, and drive business transformation. Yammer's freemium business model allows customers see the value of Yammer before upgrading to the premium offering.

Dynamic and fast, Yammer streamlines KFH's operations and integrates with applications employees use every day. Users can easily tap into knowledge across the organization, building on the work of others with smarter search that delivers personalized result for better decision-making. The tool also takes collaboration to the next level with powerful and secure mobile applications that keep teams connected and part of the community, wherever they are.

Picture:

• Waleed Mandani
• Charles Nahas