Making Innovation Everyone’s Priority

The Origins of the iD8 Program

The bank’s iD8 program was established in 2019 as a way of bringing every employee - from those interacting with customers in branch all the way through to supporting functions like HR - along on the innovation journey.

For Vlora, this approach is fundamental to the bank’s vision of who they are as an organization.

“Our vision is to be the better bank, that’s what we strive for,” she says. “And from a cultural perspective, it's really about the people - they are our greatest asset, and we understand that the more we provide them with the right opportunities, the more we leverage their strengths and their talent, the better they're going to show up.

This means they’ll be the best version of themselves at work, but it’s also about how they are going to show up for our customers and how they're going to serve them. That has been the differentiator for the bank for many years, and it continues to be our differentiator going forward.”

The desire to get people from all over the bank involved in the program also says two specific things about how the organization views innovation.

“We don't see innovation as one team's role or the remit of a specialized group of folks, we see it as something that needs to happen across the bank.

We also think of innovation in ways where it could be anywhere from small changes that can essentially optimize a process to anything that is new to the bank or even new to the industry," Vlora says.

Running an Enterprise-Wide Innovation Program

With over 95,000 people working at the bank, iD8 has a lot of employees to engage, and prospective ideas to manage… So how do Vlora and her team tackle the challenge?

“We serve as a center of excellence to essentially provide best practices, reporting, and rewards and recognition for the program. We provide a framework in terms of how it can operate, and then every single line of business has adopted it to work for them.

As you can imagine, finance has different criteria in place to, say, human resources or retail banking, so while we provide a high level view, a platform, and guidelines in terms of how to engage with colleagues, each business area then makes the program their own,” she adds.

As Vlora notes, the presence of an open ideation forum within iD8 enables employees to submit any innovation idea as it occurs to them. But there’s also a more structured, top-down approach in place which enables business leaders to set challenges in key problem areas.

“If for example an executive sponsor in a line of the business has a problem or opportunity that they want solving, they can put that as a problem statement to their colleagues, to their employees, who can then work on coming up with a solution,” she says. “This model works quite well for a number of different reasons. One is because it brings the most important opportunities that are relevant and that are in the minds of our leaders forward, so that we can all think about solving them.

But also it creates this culture of collaboration. Because, as you can imagine, when you've got a common problem that you want to solve for, people start talking together, and they start making it their own. That is really what I'd like to call the secret sauce - that collaboration, paired together with the right opportunities… It really brings optimal solutions.”

Supporting the Business as The Center of Excellence

As a center of excellence for innovation, Vlora’s team views itself as being in service to the rest of the organization, working in partnership to help everybody make the iD8 program - and innovation as a whole - a success.

“We support the business in terms of the innovation platform itself and how it operates. We might help set up some challenges for them, if that's something they're newer to, and we can provide some thoughts on how to get started, if they're thinking of a new idea.

We'll also provide some sort of a roadmap to say, here's how we see things progressing and here are the key success metrics, so they can adopt that within their context. These are the kinds of things we put forward for various teams to leverage when they partner with us.”

Along with providing a framework, the remit of Vlora’s iD8 team also includes a strong focus on fostering communication and collaboration between different business areas.

“It’s our job to bring people together, building relationships across the bank, and conducting cross-pollination around the business to share best practices around what's working and what's not working.

So, for example, if we see that a particular business is running a challenge successfully, we will look at how they set it up, and things like the timing and the logistics around it. We will then take those best practices and invite them to an open forum where they can speak to the leaders of the other lines of businesses in terms of, ‘here's what worked, and here's the lesson that we learned’.”

For Vlora, without the centralized team, the various businesses would inevitably end up following more siloed approaches, which would limit them to exploring ideas and methodologies they’re already familiar with.

“It’s our job to bring the businesses together and on a regular basis, and we do so for a number of different purposes. This could be for sharing best practices, as I’ve said. It could be for training purposes. It could be for learning something new, or finding out about what's happening in the external ecosystem. There are lots of different reasons why we bring people together to collaborate.”

The center of excellence also delivers the reward and recognition program for innovation at TD, ensuring everyone is incentivized to be creative and to find better ways of doing things.

“This is something our team takes a lot of pride in. It also creates a level of consistency and a level playing field for everyone across the bank, as people know they will be recognized in a way that resonates with them.

One of the things that we do as an organization is to have a recognition event once a year. This is where we recognize our top colleagues across the bank that have anywhere between 10 and 30+ implemented ideas. It also brings together the leaders, and the implementers who make those ideas come to life, showcasing their talent, their contributions and the impact that’s made to the bank.

This event is something that everybody looks forward to, and for people who are newer to the program, it gives them something to aim for, to attend in the future.”

Empowering Colleagues, Driving Innovation

As we’ve seen, TD’s approach to innovation is very much grounded in solving problems. Vlora terms this ‘challenge-driven innovation’, as it takes the most highly prioritized opportunities or problems that the business wants to solve, and creates an ecosystem for people to engage with, think about, and ultimately come up with solutions for these problems.

This guarantees a range of different perspectives on a problem, and a range of different possible solutions. It also enables the bank to address smaller scale, everyday initiatives, as well as bigger ideas and more transformative solutions.

"There are numerous examples within the organization of processes that over time, have become less efficient.

Let's say, something that requires five steps to get done, but which could potentially be done within three steps through optimization or automation. We encourage our colleagues to put these things forward, so that the improvements can serve them, but also because the impact is going to have a downstream effect as well.

Although optimizing processes doesn't sound as exciting as some of the larger innovations, we do see this as continuously sharpening our lens in terms of how we operate, how we best show up for our colleagues and for our customers as well.”

Although iD8 also enables TD to pursue bigger, blue-sky innovation ideas such as exploring new technologies, the basis of its approach in colleague engagement means that everyone is empowered to provide a solution to a problem that they see.