Crelan Group Revamps Learning Platform to Enhance Training and Compliance with Totara Learn

Crelan Group is a cooperative financial group and holds the fifth place within the ranking of Belgian retail banks.

On June 10, 2024, Crelan completed the full integration of AXA Bank, successfully migrating 840,000 customers and 330 branches. This milestone provided the opportunity to modernise the training platform’s design and elevate the user experience, introducing an upgraded version with a fresh, user-friendly interface tailored to its unified agents.

The Challenge

AXA Bank Belgium became part of Crelan Group at the end of 2021. In terms of learning and development, this not only resulted in a doubling of the number of agency employees to be trained, but also the introduction of new tools and new learning materials. Both entities worked with different learning management systems. Consequently, the current way of managing learning had to be reevaluated in order to establish a new process that would be efficient and effective, and that would leverage the best of both entities.

Since Crelan Group is part of the highly regulated banking sector, its agents are subject to the regulations of the Financial Services and Markets Authority (FSMA). This autonomous public institution – focused on safeguarding the integrity of the financial markets and the treatment of financial customers – imposes a number of continued education requirements on professionals that are active in the sector, such as the number of learning hours they should obtain within a given period of time. Therefore, it was important for Crelan Group to have a digital tool that would not only allow them to manage and organize training for their employees, but also track their agents’ learning and the associated FSMA points they obtained to ensure compliance. This led them to Totara.

By 2024, with the AXA brand retiring completely, the focus shifted to support the final transformation of agents moving from one bank to another and becoming fully integrated into Crelan. This transition was supported by a specific 4-month learning program for agents to get onboarded into Crelan’s operational standards, new processes and knowledge transfer regarding products.

This final migration momentum also presented the opportunity to introduce the renewed Crelan branding identity, modernise the user interface, and enhance the overall experience of the platform. The existing system, which was operating on a legacy design, benefited of a revamp while ensuring continued tracking of FSMA compliance.

The Solution

After the merger with AXA Bank, Crelan adopted Totara as its standard learning management system. AXA had successfully used Totara Learn for over a decade, supported by Deloitte, and its proven capabilities made it the ideal choice for the newly unified group.

First, the final migration aimed to ensure a smooth transition for AXA agents, with a clear structure for trainings proposed in the migration programme. A key milestone for this was the development of a custom plugin by Deloitte, enabling the target group transitioning from AXA Bank to Crelan to book their training using a new short-term distinct training booking logic. This logic allowed agents to pick dates for each of their mandatory or optional training sessions from a list of multiple locations, languages, and regions. The linear date-picker mechanism ensured that training sessions would be undertaken in a prescribed sequence and would remain locked until the previous training was completed, thereby granting access to the course content. This new functionality allowed agents to book training sessions where subsequent dates depended on the completion of a prior session, while the platform also maintained the existing booking process for other training programs.

Secondly, during the 2024 migration, the platform underwent a major upgrade to align with the needs of Crelan’s expanded organization, including a full redesign to create a more modern and user-friendly interface.

The updated platform offers a seamless experience for both internal employees and external agents, incorporating Crelan’s new branding for a visually engaging and user-friendly interface. The redesign features more imagery, updated buttons, and improved course pages with better-structured activities. Additionally, enhanced text hierarchy, refined color schemes, and other design elements contribute to a clearer and more intuitive user experience. By modernising the layout, enhancing functionality, and prioritising usability, the Totara platform reflects Crelan’s commitment to professional development and regulatory excellence in an engaging manner while optimizing the administrative processes.

Thirdly, in order to maximise user-friendliness, the catalogue also contains extensive filter options. When users open the catalogue, they arrive at a landing page that provides them with an overview of the different topics that are included in the catalogue, as well as with the possibility to pre-filter their results on these topics. They can further refine their search based on learning format, language, location and more. Most importantly, they can consult all FSMA information for each course in the course tiles and filter on FSMA points, which facilitates compliance as they can easily see which courses pertain to their specialty and how many hours they will be accredited.

Last but not least, FSMA compliance remains a central focus, with features like automated certification, and advanced filtering options for users to view FSMA points, training formats, duration and locations at a glance. Certificates for accredited courses are generated automatically and tailored to the user’s entity, while a personalised “”My FSMA Points”” page allows users to track their completed training as well as upload external certificates with achieved FSMA points.

At the organizational level, all learning and compliance data is tracked and visualised through extensive reporting. Throughout the migration journey, Crelan administrators relied also on Totara’s report builder to monitor compliance and track training progress while maintaining their Business-As-Usual daily reporting through Power BI.

The Results

The upgraded Totara platform has become a cornerstone of Crelan Group’s training and compliance strategy. Following its migration in June 2024, the platform has had a significant impact, facilitating the seamless transition of thousands of agents within just four months before the deprecation of AXA Bank—all while ensuring business-as-usual (BAU) training continued uninterrupted.

A key achievement of the migration was the development of a tailored plugin to support the final phase of the transition, allowing employees to efficiently book and track each training session in their programme. At the same time, the platform maintained its core functionalities—such as the course catalog with advanced filtering and FSMA tracking—ensuring continuity while introducing an enhanced user experience with a upgraded design. Both Crelan and former AXA agents appreciated the platform’s intuitive new interface, which combined a modernised design with the familiarity of their trusted LMS, where key functionalities remained unchanged.

Over the years, the platform recorded a total of 75,360 course completions, with more than 45,150 certificates issued and over 12,000 FSMA points earned, underscoring its effectiveness in compliance tracking and continued education. Additionally, just in 2024, more than 3,000 unique users accessed the platform, participating in 1,200 classroom & online sessions and benefiting from 300+ newly created courses.

The adaptability of Totara helped overcome typical organisational migration challenges and provided a custom solution addressing the business logic. Despite the numerous changes agents experienced in that few months, the renewed platform received positive feedback from end users and demonstrated strong engagement metrics immediately after the final migration date.

Impressed by the many possibilities offered by Deloitte and Totara, Crelan Group is eager to explore more functionalities such as automatic feedback forms, learning plans, attendance QR-code, personalised dashboards, and programmes. With Deloitte’s ongoing support, Crelan is confident in its ability to optimise the Totara platform to meet its evolving learning and compliance needs. Once again, Totara has demonstrated its adaptability, seamlessly accommodating both short-term training requirements and ongoing business-as-usual activities.