Case Study: Marsh Finance Ltd

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Marsh Finance is an established family-run company that provides motor financing directly to customers and via brokers, dealerships and manufacturers. Their tagline, sensible finance from sensible people, sums up their approach to business: treat customers with respect and ensure they have the facts, and success will follow.

Stephen Thomas, Risk & Compliance Advisory Manager at Marsh and winner of the 2021 Nimble Professional of the Year Award, knows how important ongoing learning is to his organisation. That’s why, when he joined the company back in 2019, he started looking for a solution that could help him train staff efficiently and simply, without requiring complicated technical skills.

Tasked with improving training programmes while saving money, he needed an elearning offering that he could get up and running quickly, but that enabled him to make good-looking, functional courses with ease – and that came with a Learning Management System (LMS) to track learner progress, which is critical in a compliance-based industry.

Moving forward

In a past role, Stephen had taken elearning courses created with Nimble, and found them engaging and easy to use – and now that he was tasked with building elearning himself, he got in touch with us. Although he road-tested other elearning solutions, he found Nimble out in front when it came to functionality, simplicity and design. In his own words,

“We needed to hit the ground running. Nimble provided the best opportunity to achieve this!”

And Nimble didn’t disappoint. Right from the start, Marsh Finance’s dedicated Customer Success Manager, Lesley Steventon, provided invaluable guidance. She built a strong relationship – and Stephen knows he can always rely on Lesley and the rest of the Nimble team to offer support just when he needs it.

Nimble allows Marsh to ensure all employees are receiving the same consistent message – vitally important, particularly with in-depth regulatory topics like supporting vulnerable customers or recognising financial crime. It also means staff can revisit complex subjects and refresh their knowledge, increasing their confidence in their role. Sometimes compliance can seem a bit scary – and Stephen says that keeping the learner at the heart of it all helps to remove that fear factor. The challenge isn’t just about addressing the regulations, but ensuring each member of the workforce feels competent and able to provide the best possible service to the customer.

​By using Nimble’s integrated LMS, Stephen can track each employee’s progress at the click of a button. Accountability has to be a top priority in the financial services industry, so detailed reports that can be generated instantly are key. The simple interface also encourages each team member to take responsibility for their own learning, building professional pride and making it easy to integrate learning time into the working day.

One of the biggest challenges in highly regulated industries is getting the culture right and empowering staff. It can be all too easy for employees to feel they’re just going through the motions and forget that each customer is an individual. The sense of doing the right thing by every customer is embedded from the top at Marsh Finance. As Stephen says,

“We don’t just follow these rules because we have to – we do it because we want to.”

And he’s found that because Nimble is simple and straightforward for employees to use, it really helps to reinforce these messages. The strong culture at Marsh has been there for a long time, but their learning programme has brought it all into focus.

Facing new challenges

Elearning was already solidly embedded into the working practices at Marsh Finance before the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020. As for almost every industry, the sudden lockdown and ongoing regulations had a big impact. Luckily, the suite of courses Stephen had created were on hand, and Marsh quickly pivoted their approach to meet the training needs of a team working from home. Blended learning workshops – with live video training sessions supported by elearning courses – replaced face-to-face options. Making financial compliance training relevant and engaging can be a real challenge, but by combining interactive elearning with online discussion opportunities they kept learning at the heart of the business at a difficult time.

Stephen also created a bespoke course to keep employees updated with the steps Marsh had taken to keep them safe when they began to return to the office; something that was quick and easy to do with Nimble’s simple authoring tool.

Since 2020, Marsh Finance have also surmounted some more positive challenges: inspired to disseminate their good practice throughout the sector, they’ve begun reinventing themselves as a Fintech firm, supplying their robust, industry-leading automated underwriting system to brokers and other partners. This change of focus has required a raft of new training initiatives in products and processes – and with Nimble already in place, creating and delivering this training has been plain sailing. Staff can access learning opportunities throughout their working day, as and when they have the time in their schedule, ensuring they’re always up to date with the latest developments in technology.

Leading the way

Stephen isn’t about to stop there, however:

When it comes to an industry like automotive financing, ensuring everyone is compliant with regulations is absolutely critical, but it needn’t be a tedious process. Stephen Thomas has demonstrated how using an elearning platform like Nimble in a creative, responsive way can put learning and development right at the heart of even the most regulated sector – and Marsh Finance is going from strength to strength.