Ualá is a fintech company with the mission of modernizing financial services throughout Latin America. With a mobile application and an international Mastercard, Ualá offers a financial ecosystem with an innovative, integrated, secure, and 100% digital experience. Purchases can be made at any website or store in the world that accepts Mastercard, and a wide variety of financial transactions are supported such as transferring money, withdrawing cash from ATMs, paying bills, topping up transportation cards or cell phones. Applying for personal loans, converting consumptions made in installments, investing in mutual funds, and charging products and/ or services are also possible through mPOS and payment links. Ualá is available throughout Argentina and Mexico and has issued more than 2.7 million cards.
Ualá has 650 employees working across four sites in Buenos Aires and Mexico. The company has undergone considerable growth, having hired 400 new employees during 2020 and with plans to double its headcount in 2021. With this sizable growth, they couldn’t continue using their old method of creating complicated spreadsheets to record employee data. The company needed to implement an HRIS to help them get organized, centralize their data, create workflows, and automate their HR processes.
This case study was originally written in May 2021. Since then, Uala has grown! Here’s where they are today. Scroll down further to see the original case study.
Three years later… where Ualá is today
There has been a lot of change at Uaߊá since this original customer story was written in 2021. At that time, the company had a single product and 650 employees based almost entirely in Argentina, with a small presence in Mexico. Three years on, Uaߊá is a multi-product, multi-national financial company, having acquired four companies (an e-commerce marketplace, a credit company, and two banks), with a current headcount of 1,600 and offices in Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia.
From 2020 and throughout the pandemic, Uaߊá’s main focus was growth. Subsequently, they had 20 people on their talent acquisition team, hiring between 80 and 90 people monthly. Now, Uaߊá’s largest team is the HR Business Partners team, which focuses on more strategic projects, such as ensuring that they put their resources in the right places.
How Ualá uses Bob to support their growing business needs
Uaߊá’s HR team has transformed into one of the main drivers of business growth, often asked to pull up a seat at the table for some of the most strategic decisions in the company. In the past three years, they have implemented additional Bob modules that support them even further in managing their people and gleaning strategic insights as they transitioned from a company focused on hypergrowth to one focused on their people and strategy.
First, they implemented the Talent module, enabling them to provide their multi-national workforce with a consistent performance management experience. They use goal setting to motivate their people and use a matrix reporting model across their sites, which they can manage and document simply in Bob. They also run their performance reviews in Bob, which is easy to use and enables them to run a performance review cycle in just eight weeks.
Uaߊá has also added the Compensation module and is currently testing how it manages all types of compensation, from bonuses and promotions to raises within Bob. They also implemented Bob’s Sandbox, enabling them to test all processes in Bob before going live, which made incorporating four new companies under the Uaߊá umbrella a risk-free and seamless process.
Ualá is currently in the process of implementing Bob’s Workforce Planning module, which will support their goal of more strategic hiring and perfectly round out their Bob offering.
The original case study starts here.
The challenge: Accessing employee data and metrics
Hiring managers and other decision-makers need access to employee data to benchmark salaries, check performance metrics and analyze people trends to make decisions that will help increase job satisfaction, help with effective onboarding, and much more. The Ualá HR team used complex spreadsheets with many fields listing vast amounts of data which was hard to track and use. Specific HR team members controlled this information, with other stakeholders needing to request access every time they had an inquiry, making it very inefficient. With a planned surge in new hires, the HR team needed to be more aligned, transparent, and efficient.
The solution: Bob as a centralized source of people data
Ualá no longer uses spreadsheets stored in different locations for HR-related data. All people-related information is now saved in Bob and is easily accessible by everyone on the HR team. With KPIs defined and built within Bob, HR managers can easily extract data and create reports and graphs in just a few clicks for presentations on employee data at monthly management meetings.
The challenge: Managing a surge in hiring and onboarding
Ualá had a planned headcount growth of 200% for 2020, which meant hiring at least 50 people per month. A considerable task during regular times, but then the pandemic hit, and all hiring and onboarding had to be continued remotely, maintaining the same pace and standards.
The solution: Bob’s integration with the Comeet ATS system
With such aggressive hiring goals in place, Ualá wanted to streamline the process as much as possible. The company was already using an applicant tracking system (ATS) called Comeet for recruitment and welcomed its seamless integration with Bob, enabling Ualá’s HR leaders to easily onboard new hires as their data already existed in the ATS system from the recruiting and hiring process (contact information, CV, employment agreement and start date.) This integration has saved hours of data entry for their hundreds of new hires. Bob’s onboarding workflows have made remote onboarding professional, effective, and efficient.
The challenge: Taking control of company growth
Ualá prides itself on being an organization with a flat hierarchy. As the company grew, HR was concerned about optimizing productivity and maintaining an employee-manager ratio that would keep the company balanced and ensure that teams would not become too large to manage effectively.
The solution: Bob’s Org Chart
Bob’s Org Chart enables the HR team to view the company structure easily and plan how many managers they need to recruit. The Org Chart is also beneficial for employees, particularly new hires that are onboarded remotely, enabling them to look up people in the company, their titles, and departments.
Main takeaways (updated)
- Ualá replaced the complex and inaccessible spreadsheets they used before with Bob, which serves as a single source of truth.
- Ualá uses Bob’s Analytics to gain company insights that they share with management.
- Ualá streamlined their recruitment process using Bob’s integration with the Comeet ATS.
- Ualá provides their multi-national workforce with a consistent performance management process, including goal setting and performance reviews using Bob’s Talent module.
- Ualá uses Bob’s Sandbox to test new processes before going live in Bob. Having this capability was integral to enabling Ualá to incorporate four new companies without the risk of errors.
