A Customer-Centric

Approach to Building an
End-to-End Learning
Ecosystem at XP

the

company

XP Adopts a Customer-Centric Approach to Build an End-to-End Learning Ecosystem | Copyright © 2022 The Josh Bersin Company 1
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A Fast-Growing Investment
Management Company
XP Inc. is a Brazilian investment management company that
serves 3.1 million domestic and international clients with
800+ investment products. XP was founded in 2001 and
currently has offices in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, New York
City, Miami, London, and Geneva. The company has about
6,000 employees as of late 2021—this number has been
doubling each year since 2017, and XP is preparing to reach
10,000 employees in 2022.
Summary
Challenge
• Rapidly growing customer base and portfolio of financial
product offerings.
• Innovating in silos with limited knowledge-sharing;
company-directed and compliance-focused learning.
• Creating a digital ecosystem to support the end-to-end
learning needs of the workforce.
Solution
• Built a solution in which learning is owned by internal
subject-matter experts and not by L&D.
• L&D team partnered with employees throughout the
process of establishing needs, selecting a solution, testing
out, and deploying the platform.
• Launched new platform with a laser focus on customer
needs and leveraging leaders to drive communications.
Results
• The new platform—Campus XP—makes learning accessible
to all employees through a single UI, giving them the
autonomy to author and share content, and generating
analytics that the learning team can use to measure its
progress and impact.
• Campus XP received an exceptional NPS of 87.
• The team observed 8x increase in monthly active users and
5x increase in % content authored by employees.
XP Adopts a Customer-Centric Approach to Build an End-to-End Learning Ecosystem | Copyright © 2022 The Josh Bersin Company
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Beyond Compliance: Employees
Want More Development
Founded by a group of financial consultants, the company’s
modus operandi is staying close to its customers’ most
pressing needs. This approach is deeply engrained in all of
XP’s initiatives. This philosophy is reflected in HR, too. The
talent team determines its priorities based on the needs of its
customers—the rapidly expanding workforce. Through climate
surveys and forums, the team gathers employee input to
establish and continually update its focus areas.
Since going public in 2019, XP started to rapidly grow its
customer base and portfolio of product offerings. While
several experts in the organization were innovating and
solving complex customer problems, they were doing this
in silos. There was limited knowledge-sharing. The learning
opportunities available to employees were company-directed
and compliance-focused. The need for more learning and
development and an environment where employees could
own their career growth started to surface as a pervasive
theme across all the listening channels.
XP Anywhere: A New
Remote-First Work Model
As the talent team was rethinking learning and development
(L&D), the pandemic hit and added a layer of complexity—and
an opportunity. “Last year, in the middle of the pandemic, we
made the decision to migrate our work model from traditional
face-to-face to ‘XP Anywhere,’ a remote-first model. We were
the first Brazilian company to make such a bold move,” said
Diana Schemel, former Head of Learning and Development at
XP. As is true for most organizations, the shift to remote work
during the pandemic upended traditional corporate learning
and amplified the importance of learning in the flow of work
and the need to set up mechanisms to quickly create and
disseminate just-in-time learning resources.
1
The Need for Continuous Development,
Trust, and Belonging
Driven by the needs of its customers and considering the
new remote-first work model, XP needed to create a digital
ecosystem to support the end-to-end learning needs of the
workforce. This presented the talent team with three business
problems to address:
1. XP didn’t have a clear way to scale L&D initiatives and
digital engagement was very low. XP needed to create
a digital ecosystem that fosters a culture of continuous
development and enables scalable and effective learning.
2. XP launches several new financial products every month
and financial advisors need to rapidly train their teams on
these products. The L&D team needed to find ways to
equip financial advisors and teams to facilitate high-quality
learning and knowledge-sharing.
3. With everyone working remotely, creating a sense of
belonging and engagement is more challenging. XP needed
to ensure people feel a sense of belonging and community
in the new remote-first context, and furthermore,
disseminate expected behaviors to support its strong
company culture.
The Vision: Education Breeds
Trust
XP was born as an educational firm, started by a group of
financial market experts committed to educating people how
to invest. The founders believe equipping people with the
tools they need to improve their financial performance makes
it easier to gain their trust and goes a long way in building
customer loyalty.
As the company set out to optimize learning for its workforce,
the educational component formed the foundation of the
company’s new vision for L&D. The company prides itself in
hiring teams of experts. Equipping people with the tools and
infrastructure to learn from these experts, share knowledge
with each other, and improve their own performance is
pivotal to cultivating trust, belonging, and engagement in
the workforce. This vision led XP to build a solution where
learning is owned by the true experts in the business—the
people themselves—and not by L&D.
XP Adopts a Customer-Centric Approach to Build an End-to-End Learning Ecosystem | Copyright © 2022 The Josh Bersin Company
All rights reserved. Not for distribution. Licensed material.
Defining the Solution: A
Customer-Centric Approach
By mid-2020, it had been established that the most pressing
need of XP’s workforce was learning and career growth.
As a solution, XP wanted to create an environment where
people can learn from each other, especially in a remote and
digital work model. However, XP wanted to ensure they fully
understood all L&D–related pain points, rather than just
scratching the surface. The process of discovering challenges
and launching a new approach spanned five phases:
Phase 1: Discovery
“We conducted a discovery process, and it became clear that
we needed to bring in a new technological enabler, because
our traditional LMS wasn’t able to deliver what our customers
wanted,” said Schemel. XP operates in a highly regulated
industry, and its LMS primarily supported mandatory
compliance training requirements, but it did not support
modern learning capabilities such as continuous learning,
content authoring, and tailored learning recommendations. XP
needed to widen the aperture of learning beyond compliance
and build a learning ecosystem that could support a modern
learning culture.
Phase 2: Global Search
Moving forward on the decision to adopt a new technology
to enable their strategy, the L&D team partnered with a
team of employees to establish criteria that the new solution
should meet. This team included stakeholders from HR and
the business, representing the voice of learners as well as
administrators, including IT and digital security infrastructure
representatives. The search criteria established by this
team covered the whole gamut from mandatory compliance
requirements to an engaging user experience, with a
corresponding list of features and functionalities within each
area. The broad categories that served as the search criteria
for XP’s new learning technology included the following:
•  Visualization and usability
• Technical requirements, information security, and
compliance
2
 •  Recommender system
•  Content management and creation
•  XP Anywhere (Face-to-face, online, and self-paced
training)
•  Data
•  Quizzes
•  Social learning
Phase 3: Proof of Concept Testing
Based on the search criteria, XP conducted a market review
of learning solutions and shortlisted two solutions. The
discovery team tested out the two platforms and voted on
several parameters such as the extent to which the solution
supported their selection criteria, their experience working
with the vendor, etc. Based on meticulous user testing and
review, the team selected Valamis—an end-to-end solution
that provides learners with access to a vast array of learning
opportunities from a single user interface (UI).
Phase 4: Minimum Viable Product
(MVP) Design and Launch
For the next three months, XP collaborated with a designated
team of customers (employees) and the Valamis team to
develop personas and prioritize customization needs for what
would add the most value for each of those personas. This
MVP was then launched to a small audience selected by the
L&D team with the intent of creating a success story that
other teams would want to follow. XP launched the MVP with
a clear, strategic intent of creating buy-in by building on the
pain points that the solution intended to address, rather than
adopting a marketing or promotional approach. XP followed
the following guiding principles for the MVP launch:
• The MVP launch will be led by influential and admired
leaders, not the L&D team.
• The communications would focus on the “why” and not
the “what.” The focus would be on the pain points that
the platform would address, rather than the platform
itself.
•  Participants would receive system-generated
notifications about content and events connected to
their development needs, and not about the features or
benefits of the platform.
Phase 5: Implementation and Rollout
For the next 45 days, XP made some adjustments based on
the MVP launch and by mid-2021, launched the platform
to the entire company. For the companywide launch, XP
repeated the strategy that worked during the MVP and invited
leaders to talk to their teams about how the new digital
platform would support employees’ development and career
growth. XP tapped into opportunities already in place for
rolling out communications—for example, all hands meetings
and existing business events instead of creating new meetings
or events.

Figure 1: Customer-Centric Approach to Building a Learning Ecosystem

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5

Discovery Global Search Proof of Concept MVP Design and Implementation
Testing Launch and Rollout

Establish criteria, Launch the solution

Involve users in
features, and to a small audience, Adjust and iterate
Identify learner testing and voting on
functionalities that with a focus on based on MVP
pain points. the user experience
matter most to XP addressing the results, launch, and
before selecting a
employees. needs of that communication.
solution.
specific audience.

Source: The Josh Bersin Company, 2022

XP Adopts a Customer-Centric Approach to Build an End-to-End Learning Ecosystem | Copyright © 2022 The Josh Bersin Company 3
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Campus XP: An End-to-End Figure 2: Capabilities Supported by XP’s Learning Ecosystem

Learning Ecosystem
Campus XP—as the new digital learning platform is called— Learning
provides a wide array of learning technology capabilities Experience
that support a modern learning infrastructure (see Figure Platform
2). Campus XP makes learning accessible to all employees
Learning
through a single UI, gives them the autonomy to author and
Mangement Analytics
share content, and generates analytics that the learning team System
can use to measure its progress and impact.

Campus XP helps advance learning and development at XP in Campus XP

several ways:

•  Democratized Learning: All employees have access to Learning

learning and can learn from each other.
•  Learner Autonomy: People can choose what, when, and
how they want to learn.
•  Personalized Recommendations: Tailored
recommendations to help employees improve
performance, based on their skill gaps and interests.
•  Synchronous and Asynchronous Learning: Aligned
with XP’s remote-first, hybrid, and flexible new way of
working.
•  Creating and Sharing Content: Employees can easily
create new content to upskill and train their teams on
new products, as well as share knowledge more broadly
aligned with their areas of expertise.
Campus XP also helps cultivate a sense of belonging through
its “communities” feature where people sharing common
interests and aspirations can interact through forums and
wikis. Employees can join any community they are interested
in, either to seek help in navigating challenges in their
current roles, or to prepare for future career roles. Currently,
Campus XP has over 20 different communities that bring
people together on various common areas of interest such as
building skills in data and analytics and stewarding gender
equality.
Content
Record
Authoring
Store
eCommerce*
*Capability supported, but not currently in use
Source: The Josh Bersin Company, 2022
Results: Exceptional
Satisfaction and Engagement
The net promotor score for Campus XP is 87, which is an
exceptional score for any learning solution. Early statistics
since the launch of Campus XP and even during the MVP
have been outstanding (see Figure 3 on the following page).
The new solution provides compliance and development
training; asynchronous and synchronous learning; as well
as interactive knowledge-sharing channels like forums
and wikis all available in one place. Almost half of the
content creation and sharing in the environment is done by
employees outside the L&D team, which is a testimony to
the effectiveness of the new solution.

XP Adopts a Customer-Centric Approach to Build an End-to-End Learning Ecosystem | Copyright © 2022 The Josh Bersin Company 4
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Figure 3: Results Before, During, and Postlaunch of Campus XP

ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NEW PLATFORM OLD LMS MVP CAMPUS XP

8× increase in
monthly active users
11% 76% 85%

3× increase in
monthly access per user
2 days 6 days 7 days

5× increase in
% content authored by employees
9% 17% 43%

Source: The Josh Bersin Company, 2021

The success of the adoption of the new platform can be Through Campus XP, employees have
attributed to the solution itself, and to the way the solution access to synchronous learning, and they
was launched—with a laser focus on customer needs, a deep also have access to features such as forums
understanding of pain points, consulting with customers and wikis where they can interact, teach,
throughout the selection and launch of the solution, and and learn from each other. What’s more
leveraging leaders to drive communications. The new scalable than your own people teaching
approach has been a real enabler for driving scalability of each other and helping with each other’s
learning and creating an environment that fosters continuous development?
development. Diana Schemel
former Head of Learning and Development at XP

XP Adopts a Customer-Centric Approach to Build an End-to-End Learning Ecosystem | Copyright © 2022 The Josh Bersin Company 5
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About the Authors

Josh Bersin
Josh founded Bersin & Associates in 2001 to provide research and advisory services focused
on corporate learning. He expanded the company’s coverage to encompass HR, talent
management, talent acquisition, and leadership and became a recognized expert in the talent
market. Josh sold the company to Deloitte in 2012 and was a partner in Bersin by Deloitte
up until 2018.

In 2019, Josh founded the Josh Bersin Academy, a professional development academy that
has become the “home for HR.” In 2020, he put together a team of analysts and advisors
who are now working with him to support and guide HR organizations from around the
world under the umbrella of The Josh Bersin Company. Recent research covers topics such
as hybrid work; HR technology market trends; employee experience; and diversity, equity,
and inclusion. He is frequently featured in publications such as Forbes, Harvard Business
Review, HR Executive, The Wall Street Journal, and CLO Magazine. He is a popular
blogger and has more than 800,000 followers on LinkedIn.

Nehal Nangia
Nehal is the senior manager for research at The Josh Bersin Company. In this role, Nehal drives empirical
research on key workforce-related topics and the development of actionable insights and powerful stories
for today’s talent executives. Nehal has almost 15 years of professional experience in human capital,
with a focus on performance management; employment value proposition; workforce transformation;
and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Prior to joining The Josh Bersin Company, Nehal was a global
advisor for clients at Deloitte and published several studies on pertinent topics such as DEI, performance
management, and bias. Nehal lives and works in India and has a master’s degree in psychology.

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