U.S. Bank’s Streamlined and Centralized ICM Motivates Employees and Satisfies Regulators

Minnesota-based U.S. Bank is the fifth-largest bank in the United States,with over 70,000 employees and $664 billion in assets as of December2024. U.S. Bank provides a comprehensive line of financial products and services that make banking safe, simple, and convenient.

Challenge

U.S. Bank had made a decision to invest in their SPM program and deploy Varicent ICM across their business units. However, before implementation could begin, a number of challenges had to be addressed.

• Multiple business lines using various technologies and disparate processes to manage sales compensation without a clear understanding of how these business lines would interact once on a new solution
• Unclear expectations around future state governance models and appropriate enablement strategies including
  the desired need to establish a ‘Center of Excellence’
• Unclear roadmap to deploy/enable SPM technology across business units in to help drive consistency and accountability
• Unclear business case and limited support from executive team to support an SPM deployment

Solution

U.S. Bank partnered with OpenSymmetry to complete the following efforts in support of their future state SPM goals.

PRE-DEPLOYMENT PLANNING

• Project team assessed the current state of each business unit and determined their future state sales compensation needs, readiness to deploy, and initial deployment requirements.
• The team developed a future state vision for U.S. Bank’s SPM program that included technical infrastructure, process mappings,defined center of excellence and governance structure, as well as business case justifications.
• Leveraging deployment expectations to obtain desired future state, the team developed a project plan for the deployment of SPM across the business lines while considering an on going enablement strategy.
• The final presentation to the board was completed by OS and U.S.Bank project leaders, resulting in approval to move forward with a deployment of Varicent SPM solution.

SPM (VARICENT) DEPLOYMENT

• Leveraging a multi-phased approach and a combined team of U.S.Bank and OpenSymmetry resources, the project was completed in4 main phases allowing the U.S. Bank team to take more and more ownership of implementation efforts as the project progressed using a mentoring program.
• To obtain the desired future state (process, desired governance model, and configuration / technology), the project ensured an active effort to account for business process redesign to focus on obtaining the desired future state across all facets and ensure the development and implementation of a Center of Excellence to provide oversight for SPM company wide.

Result

Through the completion of their planning phase and a highly successful deployment, U.S. Bank currently maintains / manages this program with little help from vendors or external consultants. Considered a “best in class” program by peers in the space, U.S. Bank is often invited to speak at conferences and share their story and successes.

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