Banks in Scandinavia gain easier everyday with new Nordic collaboration platform

Security risks are the greatest headache when a common collaboration platform is to be created for financial and regulated companies. While being implemented, the COVID-19 lockdowns in particular has amplified the need for facilitating online meetings, chats, and project management.

An IT operations organisation behind a Nordic collaboration for the financial sector has solved the Gordian knot with a secure collaboration solution in collaboration with Pointwork.

Today, the operations organisation delivers a common IT collaboration platform to more than 100 small and large banks. During the implementation, it was important to afford the members autonomy without losing control and compromise security at the banks and their branches.

As a result, MOCA365 was chosen, which is an add-on to M365, making it possible to deliver a multi-tenant solution while servicing each bank individually by a single solution.

Increased autonomy for the end-user

With MOCA365 delivered by Pointwork, the member banks have received a self-service portal, making available intelligent and user-friendly collaboration rooms, without the members risking violating the GDPR regulations or compromising on the security. Where the people responsible for IT in the member banks, prior experienced that the request for a collaboration room could take days or weeks, because it went via email to the operations organisation, the end-user in the member banks can now do the request online in very short order and get to work.

MOCA365 is built around templates making it easy for the end-user to create different collaboration rooms such as confidential conversations on management levels, conversations on projects, for procurement, and more. The end-user receives the exact room that is needed, while the governance decided by the operations organisation is implicit in the rooms being created via the self-service portal.

“This autonomy means the world. It is a quantum leap that an organisation is able to roll it out to member banks throughout Scandinavia without it being a security risk,” says Lars Hejn Kristensen, Senior Consultant at Pointwork.

At the operations organisation behind the Nordic collaboration and the people responsible for IT at the member banks, greater autonomy translates to resources being freed up from the administration of collaboration rooms for such things as monitoring and better servicing of the member banks.

Among other things, MOCA365 affords greater transparency and better management of all collaboration rooms. For instance, the solution will automatically make the organisation aware if a collaboration room no longer has an owner (due to an owner having vacated his or her position or have been moved to a different position in the organisation). In this way, a new owner can quickly be assigned, or IT can close down disused collaboration rooms instantly.

New collaboration rooms in the future

Today, the Nordic operations organisation behind the IT platform are able to service an extremely complicated structure and thereby service the member banks better in the future. With MOCA365, there are many opportunities for building atop the new collaboration and communications platform.

To begin, the easiest way is to develop the current templates so that a collaboration is able to contain project models with automatically created documents, tabs, channels, and so on.

All collaboration rooms today are barring collaboration partners and customers. That means that the member banks are unable to collaborate with people outside the organisation. However, in the future, they will be able to create a template able to guide the dialogue with the customer, and where all compliance is build up around that.

As a consequence of the pilot project with select member banks, a new project has emerged concerning common business processes – that is; adapted standard solutions capable of being rolled out across departments. In the long run, there is also a need of the member banks to gain autonomy to create SharePoint sites themselves – that is; intranet preconfigured with contents and a complete structure, communication sites, and search. Because of this, the Nordic IT platform covers many needs going forward.

If a member bank has a specific need, the solution can later be made generic and easily be distributed to other business units, banks, branches, and functions with the same need. To share this way creates great value.