Bank Intranets

Include global navigation (i.e. available on all pages) on your intranet, and use Mega Menus. Mega Menus provide quadruple the navigational space compared to a traditional drop down menu. This interactive navigation will present your users with more easy-to-find links for your intranet.

Placing the most popular links and frequently used resources on your Mega Menu makes it easier for your branch employees, which yields higher employee engagement for your site. In addition, Mega Menus provide easy access to the documents, resources and communication channels your employees use most, providing one-click access to frequently used items like vacation request form, HR benefits, IT support, tips, tools, etc. You can also add news feeds, images, widgets and other dynamic content to your Mega Menus.

As a best practice, keep your navigation menu labels simple and organize your Mega Menus in a way that is intuitive for your users. Employees shouldn’t have to think about where to click to locate a desired item. Learn more about navigation.

Make life simple for employees by creating different sites containing helpful types of financial resources.

For example, your intranet comes with a pre-built Compliance Council site. This site includes extremely valuable resources for your council, including: Council Calendar, Compliance Discussions, Compliance Training, Compliance Risk Assessment and more. A best practice for the built-in Compliance Council site is setting and assigning policy revision dates, automated policy approval workflows and policy publishing delegation as well as restricting access to your Compliance Site to only your Compliance Council Members. Later, you can easily copy or replicate your Compliance Council Site and use it as a template for a Board of Directors Site, or other sites on your Financial Intranet.

Another best practice for creating financial sites is including different sites per department or branch location with important information and resources specifically for that group. For example, banks having a site just for Financial Advisors. These sites can serve to enhance those communities by keeping them connected, providing them with specific applications or forms to do their job and allowing them space to establish their own identity within your organization. Learn more about Sites on your intranet.

Just like creating useful financial sites, creating useful financial forms is important for bank intranets. As a best practice, with new bank installations we've included a Borrow Required Information Waiver form. This form is simple to use with radio buttons to waive or extend a financial item and easily upload supporting documents before submitting the form, allowing your bank to store complete records of the information waiver. This form is then added to your centralized document repository, for easy look-up later.

Another useful form for financial organizations that have multiple branches is a gas mileage form. If certain employees are driving from branch to branch, it's a great idea to include a form employees can fill out directly on your intranet which calculate the miles driven, and the option to upload their gas receipt for reimbursement.

We’ve created several forms pre-built into your bank intranet, including:

• Compliance Forms: Policy Change Checklist, Reporting Standards for Audits, Introduction for New Policy Managers
• HR Forms and Tests: Health and Safety Test, Employee Satisfaction Survey, Position Aptitude Test, Expense Report, Job Application Form
• Member Services: Counterfeit Note Report, Borrower Required Information Waiver, Returned Mail Destruction, Refund Waiver Form, Internet Banking Application, Know Your Client, BSA Cash Transaction Report
• Policy Review: Policy Status
• Printable Customer Forms: Term Deposit Application, Savings Account Application, Internet Banking Request Form, Checking Account Application, Change Linked Account Request Form

Learn more about using forms in the Forms Overview article.

It's important that your intranet have useful and helpful resources all staff can use, including even part time, front-line staff. We've built in a Member Services Group that's dedicated completely to the needs of tellers and front-line, customer-facing employees. The site includes information and resources that will help employees better serve your customers. For example, the Member Services Group contains: Quick Links for Tellers, Rate Spread Calculator Link, Member Talking, Member Reward Center and more. For web-based resources that don’t reside in your intranet, you can easily link to these from the intranet, making it your central location to find the tools your employees need.

Not all of your part-time staff (such as a weekend teller at a bank) may have a login or access to your intranet. In this case, a best practice would be to include kiosks behind the teller line or in the staff room that displays your intranet to these staff.

Many banks have multiple branches across several different geographic locations, which can make communication and collaboration among staff a challenge. Best practice is to include self-service branch sites - we've already built one into your intranet at install. These sites allow employees to connect, communicate and collaborate from various office locations. We have built-in branch pages that include Status Updates, Team or Employee Profiles, Live Chat, Branch Announcements, Employee Milestones and more. You can make these pages as social as you’d like, or turn off social features as needed.

A great tip for engaging employees using the self-service branch site is to schedule a Lunch & Learn workshop using the Training Calendar, and during the session share more about how to use the intranet. In addition, featuring employees from other branches on the branch sites is a great way for employees across various locations to get to know one another. Learn more about the Training Calendar.

Your intranet is a great tool for training staff on products or services. You can upload training videos directly to the site for employees to watch and study, then have them take a test using the Online Test feature.

As an example, training credit union employees on security and standards. A best practice for doing this on your financial intranet is creating Question Banks within your Online Tests to automatically refresh with new questions every time someone takes the test. This will help ensure knowledge transfer is successful by presenting your staff with different questions each time they take a test. In addition, using Online Tests will allow employees to score themselves on the spot, identify knowledge gaps, learn more and retake the test as many times as they need to. Learn more about online tests.

You could also host product seminars using the Training Calendar, which allows employees to register and reserve their seat. You can also make these mandatory and keep track of who has registered and who hasn’t, and send emails to those who haven’t registered for mandatory sessions yet. Learn more about the Training Calendar.

Get your bank involved in the community.

Build a Community Site which includes all information about your bank's involvement with a fundraiser or organization. The bank can actively participate by hosting, participating in and promoting fundraising among staff. For example, if your organization participates in UNICEF, your Community Site has a registration page, donation page and more. Or host an intranet game like intranet bingo, and have employees donate to your cause in order to play. Learn more about creating Sites.

To make employees aware of your Community Site, best practice is to feed a section of it onto your home page using a widget. Learn more about widgets.

Many banks are often working on several projects at once. These projects can involve a different employees from various departments, which can make project coordination and collaboration difficult. You can make projects simpler with Project Sites. Project Sites facilitate communication and collaboration by providing a central area on your intranet where employees involved in the project can work together digitally. Include message boards and discussion forums that enable employees to discuss various aspects of the project together.

In addition, you can include a task widget that shows what tasks need to be done and which are already completed while delegating the remaining tasks to group members. A best practice for Project Sites is removing view access (i.e. making the site invisible) for those outside of the project group. This ensures sensitive information is not shared with the wrong people.

Your bank's intranet installation comes with a Company Store app, which can be used as an inventory management tool to track and replenish supplies, equipment, branded and promotional material, etc. For example, you can upload photos of branded material such as credit card information brochures and employees can then click the photo to order more when branch supplies are running low. To help control costs, you can have one Company Store app for the entire organization, or separate Company Store apps tailored to each department. For each store, one or more cart managers can decide if the purchase is necessary, before submitting the order for fulfillment.

Another great way to use this feature is by including branded items such as hoodies, shirts, stickers and more that have the company logo on them, or the logo of a specific campaign your organization is participating in such as UNICEF. Employees can order branded items for themselves or for family. Learn more about the Company Store app.

Several banks have shared their experiences about using our intranet software, and how it has impacted their organizations:

Redwood Capital Bank

This California-based bank with multiple locations went from no intranet and paper-based forms, to centralized documents and proper forms with workflows - and resultant time savings.
Learn more in the Redwood Capital Bank case study.

Citizens and Northern Bank, Ephrata National Bank, and El Dorado Savings Bank

Find out what made each of these three banks seek an intranet solution, the top software features used in their intranet, and how our software has helped simplify things within their organization.
Learn more about three bank customers' intranet usage.

Orrstown Bank, First National Bank and Trust Company

Both of these banks used their intranet for employee recognition. Orrstown used an 'I Spy a Wow' form to share customer service wins, and First National has 'Gr8ness Employee Recognition Program' using our Employee Recognition app.

Learn more in our blog post 'Give Your Employees The Recognition They Deserve'