Axis Bank Launches Axis Academies

Axis Bank, India’s third largest private sector bank has launched its path breaking, first of its kind Academies with best in class partners to build proficiency for its 56,000 workforce. Axis Banks wants to nurture the traditional banking skills with a new age lens, calling it “Twin-Tracking”. This initiative aims at nurturing the skill-sets and encouraging its employees to self-identify and select areas of specialization that will enable them to become future-ready digital bankers.

Commenting on the launch of Axis Academies, Rajesh Dahiya, Executive Director, Axis Bank, said, “We believe that continuous learning is critical for the Bank to be taken to the next level. With rapid adoption of digitization across the ecosystem, it’s becoming imperative to review and redesign our decision making frameworks. Building strong digital capabilities through consistent learning process will act as a critical element in driving this reengineering and to stay relevant and agile. To fulfill the goal of digital India, our Academies will ensure that we nurture and create more digital bankers in the country.”

Axis Bank in association with INSEAD, one of the world’s leading business schools, is setting up ‘AXIS INSEAD Digital Leadership Academy’, country’s first ever academy on Digital Leadership. The Academy will focus on building digital bankers in line with furthering the nation’s agenda of digitization.

Commenting on the association, Jukka Majanen – Director, Corporate Partnerships (Executive Education), INSEAD said, “This is a groundbreaking Academy and we at INSEAD are very happy to be part of this exciting journey. Banking is going through a lot of disruption and as we have seen with industries in this situation, organizations have to be very proactive. Axis Bank is taking the lead by being proactive and becoming a leader.”

The Bank has also partnered with CRISIL, India’s foremost provider of ratings, data and research and leaders in executive education in the areas of Credit and Risk in India to set-up Axis CRISIL Risk Academy and Axis CRISIL Credit Academy. Prasad Koparkar, Senior Director, CRISIL Research, said, “The Academies will provide employees with best in class content on a digital on the go platform. This will equip employees to take on cross functional assignments within the bank and build employability.”

Additionally, to empower its employees to translate the data into actionable insights, the bank has partnered with INSOFE, India’s premier school of Data Science to introduce Axis INSOFE Academy for Analytics.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr. Sree Rama K. Murthy, Senior Mentor and Principal Advisor – Curriculum Development, INSOFE said, “Data is very important in context of Banking. Every individual needs to have an analytical mindset. Most jobs in the future will be infused with analytics. Banking for the future will be driven by analytics. The one of a kind Axis INSOFE Academy of Analytics will offer blended programs that inspire the learners to integrate data sciences into their day to day functioning and become data driven bankers.”

India is witnessing enormous change, especially in the wake of demonetization. The complexities necessitate reconfiguring organization decision and control frameworks. This requires acquiring new capabilities and learning continuously. Further, the world of work is changing and in the next decade, 60% skills which exist today will be redundant.

Axis Bank has always believed that continuous learning is critical for people and the organization to grow. The bank has an internal learning portal that consists of a strong catalogue of over 1500 courses to nurture the skill-sets of its employees. The Bank’s recent partnership with Coursera supplemented the catalogue with content delivered by the best universities across the globe. Curated, contextualized classroom interventions for leaders at various levels also augmented the learning architecture.

With the launch of Twin-Tracking Academies, Axis Bank aims at blending traditional banking skills with a new age lens alongside futuristic skills. The Academies are a step towards providing employees the ability to decide what specializations they would like to acquire at the pace of their choice. Twin tracking capabilities is the way of the future and the Academies will play a large role in driving that transformation across the Bank and industry-at-large.