Santander Consumer USA added an online channel this summer for employees to share ideas to improve the company’s compliance and customer service, said Chief Executive Jason Kulas.
“We put a link on our intranet that we call Ideas into Action, and we launched this in August,” Kulas said, while speaking at the J.P. Morgan Fintech & Specialty Finance Forum last week. “Just since August, we’ve gotten 500 ideas from our employees for ways we can be better at compliance and consumer practices, and be more efficient.”
Previously, the company would solicit suggestions from its employees during town hall meetings at its various locations. While ideas were submitted at regular intervals, it wasn’t enough, Kulas said. So, SC set out to offer employees a channel to speak directly to the company, in a forum that gives them the ability to not be filtered through various levels of management, he added.
“We have monitors all over our company, in all locations, and these people’s faces are posted when we adopt their ideas,” Kulas said. “We make a big deal about it, and we think that’s influencing culture.”
Investing in a company’s culture of compliance is paramount, regardless of what the political environment might be, Kulas said, in reference to how the presidential election may reshape the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “We fundamentally believe that the companies in consumer finance that are successful over a long period of time — and we’re not talking about survival, we want to be successful and we want to thrive — the ones that do that, are the ones that take [compliance] seriously.”