This new offering was based on Halogen's experience working with close to 100 financial organizations worldwide. Built to address industry-specific challenges including regulatory compliance, difficulty implementing cultural shifts, the distributed nature of employees and the high turnover in customer-facing roles, the suite enables organizations to more effectively manage their talent to create significant cost savings and greater efficiency.

"Halogen's offering has enabled East West Bank to streamline our employee performance management initiatives saving us valuable time," said Tess Hemedez, Human Resources. East West Bank is the second largest independent commercial bank headquartered in Los Angeles. East West Bank serves the community with 58 branch locations across Southern and Northern California, one branch location in Houston, Texas and a Beijing Representative Office in China. "Their new solution designed specifically for the financial services sector addresses the critical issues faced by HR teams across the market. We are looking forward to taking full advantage of these new capabilities, especially the competency libraries and features that will help us support regulatory compliance."

The suite which includes the flagship eAppraisal for Financial Services as well as Halogen eSuccession, Halogen eCompensation and Halogen e360 provides HR leaders, compliance officers and even C-level executives with an easy to use, practical and affordable means to deliver employee appraisals, assessments, compensation adjustments and succession plans. The system also provides executive dashboards to help track corporate and individual goals and other important performance metrics.

Employees working in the financial services industry require very specific skills, knowledge and behaviors, which Halogen eAppraisal for Financial Services supports with a specialized library of competencies. "By developing a distinct competency library that addresses specific banking, insurance and wealth management functions, organizations can evaluate, measure and manage competencies that are directly relevant to their business," said Lisa Rowan, Program Manager, HR and Talent Management Services, at IDC.

Addressing Compliance for Financial Services Organizations

Financial services organizations are increasingly subject to internal, federal and state compliance regulations and HR departments are often responsible for managing audits and investigations or requests from numerous regulatory bodies. Halogen Employee Performance and Talent Management Suite for Financial Services enables HR to be successful by playing a key role in achieving compliance, by ensuring that compliance expectations are communicated to, understood by and adhered to by all employees. Additionally, goal alignment and management features in the suite for financial services increase overall accountability to shareholders while supporting compliance requirements by reinforcing the critical nature that day-to-day activities play in reducing the risk of non-compliance to state and federal regulations.

Flexible Deployment

Halogen offers financial services customers a range of flexible deployment options to best suit the implementation, pricing and data security requirements of each organization. Halogen offers perpetual or subscription (rental) pricing as well as on-premise or on-demand (hosted) deployment. On-premise deployment enables organizations to deploy the solution within their firewall to alleviate common security concerns with hosted offerings. However, customers can still take advantage of the benefits of a subscription-based fee structure if it suits their situation better.