Case Study by The Josh Bersin Company: XP Adopts a Customer-Centric Approach to Build an End-to-End Learning Ecosystem

A Hyper-Growing Investment Management Company 

XP Inc. is a Brazilian investment management company. The company serves 3.1 million domestic and international clients with 800+ investment products. XP was founded in 2001, and currently has offices in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Miami, London, and Geneva. The company is sized at about 6000 employees right now — this number has been doubling each year since the last four years, and XP is preparing to reach 10,000 employees by next year. 

The Challenge: Beyond Compliance - Employees Want More Development 

Founded by a group of financial consultants, the company's modus operandi is staying close to its customers' most pressing needs. This approach is deeply engrained in everything XP does. This philosophy is reflected in HR too. The talent team determines its priorities based on the needs of its customers—the rapidly expanding workforce. Through climate surveys and forums, the team gathers employee input to establish and continually update its focus areas.  

In the last two years since going public in 2019, XP started to rapidly grow its customer base and portfolio of product offerings. While several experts in the organization were innovating and solving complex customer problems, it was happening in silos. There was limited knowledge sharing. The learning opportunities available to employees were company-directed and compliance focused. The need for more learning and development and an environment where employees could own their career growth started to surface as a pervasive theme across all the listening channels. 

XP Anywhere: A New Remote-First Work Model 

As the talent team was rethinking L&D, the pandemic hit, and added a layer of complexity – and an opportunity. “Last year, in the middle of the pandemic, we madethe decision to migrate our work model from traditional face-to-face, to ‘XP Anywhere’, a remote-first model. We were the first Brazilian company to make such a bold move,” said Diana Schemel, former Head of Learning and Development at XP. As is true for most organizations, the shift to remote work during the pandemic upended traditional corporate learning and amplified the importance of learning in the flow of work and the need to establish mechanisms to quickly create and disseminate just-in-time learning resources.  

XP’s Business Challenges: Need for Continuous Development, Trust and Belonging 

Driven by the needs of its customers and in light of the new remote-first work model, XP needed to create a digital ecosystem to support the end-to-end learning needs of theworkforce. 

XP was born as an educational firm, started by a group of financial market experts committed to educating people how to invest. The founders believed that educating people on how to invest and equipping them with the tools they need to improve their financial performance makes it easier to gain their trust and goes a long way in building customer loyalty.  

As the company set out to optimize learning for its workforce, the educational component formed the foundation of the company’s new vision for L&D. The company prides itself in hiring teams of experts. Equipping people with the tools and infrastructure to learn from these experts, share knowledge with each other and improve their own performance is pivotal to cultivating trust, belonging and engagement in the workforce. XP decided to build a solution where learning is owned by the true experts in the business—the people themselves—and not by L&D.  

The Solution: A Customer-Centric Approach 

By mid-2020, it had been established that the most pressing need of XP’s workforce was learning and career growth. As a solution, XP wanted to create a learning environment where people can learn from each other, especially in a remote and digital work model. However, XP wanted to ensure they fully understood all L&D related pain-points, rather than just scratching the surface. The process of discovering challenges and launching a new approach spanned five phases. 

Phase 1: Discovery  

“We conducted a discovery process, and it became clear that we needed to bring in a new technological enabler, because our traditional LMS wasn’t able to deliver what our customers wanted,” said Schemel. XP operates in a highly regulated industry, and their LMS primarily supported mandatory compliance training requirements, but it did not support modern learning capabilities such as continuous learning, content authoring, tailored learning recommendations. XP needed to widen the aperture of learning beyond compliance and build a learning ecosystem that could support a modern learning culture.  

Phase 2: Global Search 

Moving forward on the decision to adopt a new technology to enable their strategy, the talent team partnered with a team of employees to establish criteria that the new solution should meet. This team included stakeholders from HR and the business, representing the voice of learners as well as administrators, including IT and digital security infrastructure representatives.  The search criteria established by this team covered the whole gamut from mandatory compliance requirements to an engaging user experience, with a corresponding list of features and functionalities within each area. The broad categories that served as the search criteria for XP’s new learning technology included the following. 

• Visualization/Usability 
• Technical requirements, IS & Compliance 
• Recommender system 
• Content management & creation 
• XP Anywhere (Face-to-face, online and self-paced training) 
• Data 
• Quizzes 
• Social Learning 

Phase 3: Proof of Concept Testing 

Based on the search criteria, XP conducted a market review of learning solutions and shortlisted two solutions. The discovery team tested out the two platforms, and voted on several parameters such as the extent to which the solution supported their selection criteria, their experience working with the vendor, etc. Based on meticulous user testing and review, the team selected Valamis—an end-to-end solution that provides learners with access to a vast array of learning opportunities from a single UI. 

Phase 5: Implementation and Rollout 

For the next 45 days, XP made some adjustments based on the MVP launch and by mid-2021, launched the platform to the entire company. For the company-wide launch, XP repeated the strategy that worked during the MVP, and invited leaders to talk to their teams about how the new digital platform would support employees’ development and career growth. XP tapped into opportunities already in place for rolling out communications – for example, all hands meetings and existing business eventsinstead of creating new meetings or events. 

Campus XP: An End-to-End Learning Ecosystem 

Campus XP – as the new digital learning platform is called – provides a wide array of learning technology capabilities that support a modern learning infrastructure, see figure X. Campus XP makes learning accessible to all employees through a single UI, gives them the autonomy to author and share content, and generates analytics that the learning team can use to measure its progress and impact. 

Figure 2: Capabilities supported by XP’s Learning Ecosystem 

Campus XP helps advance learning and development at XP in several ways:

• Democratized Learning: All employees have access to learning and can learn from each other.
• Learner Autonomy: People can choose what, when and how they want to learn.
• Personalized Recommendations: Tailored recommendations to help employees improve performance, based on their skill gaps and interests.
• Synchronous and Asynchronous Learning: Aligned with XP’s remote-first, hybrid and flexible new way of working.
• Creating and sharing content: Employees can easily create new content to upskill and train their teams on new products, as well as to share knowledge more broadly aligned with their areas of expertise. 

It also helps cultivate a sense of belonging through its “communities” feature where people sharing common interests and aspirations can interact through forums and wikis. Employees can join any community they are interested in, either to seek help in navigating challenges in their current roles, or to prepare for future career roles. Currently, Campus XP has over 20 different communities that go from the Data Community, for people wanting more technical exchange to help them enhance their data driven mindset and skills, to the MLHR3 Community, the women’s collective who has embrace the commitment of advocating and open doors for more gender equality. 

Results: Exceptional Satisfaction and Engagement 

The Net Promotor Score for Campus XP is 87% which is exceptional for any learning solution. Early statistics since the launch of Campus XP and even during the MVP have been outstanding, see Table X. The new solution makes compliance and development training, asynchronous and synchronous learning, as well as interactive knowledge sharing channels like forums and wikis, all available in one place. Almost half of the content creation and sharing in the environment it’s done by employees outside the L&D team, which is a testimony to the effectiveness of the new solution.  

“Through Campus XP, employees have access to synchronous learning, and they also have access to features such as forums and wikis where they can interact, teach and learn from each other. What's more scalable than your own people teaching each other and helping with each other’s development?” – Diana Schemel, former Head of Learning and Development at XP 

Table: Results before, during, and post the launch of Campus XP 

The success of the adoption of the new platform can be attributed to the solution itself, and also to the way the solution was launched—with a laser focus on customer’s needs, a deep understanding of pain-points, liaising with customers throughout the selection and launch of the solution, and leveraging leaders to drive communications. The new approach has been a real enabler for driving scalability of learning and creating an environment that fosters continuous development.