Interac recognized for best-in-class intranet transformation at OVATION awards

Another Unily client takes first place for intranet success

The OVATION awards celebrate the talent and creative brilliance of Greater Toronto Area’s marketing, communication, and public relations community. Unily customer Interac Corp. has been recognized with a Merit award in the Digital Communication & Communication for the Web category for best-in-class intranet transformation.

Interac’s Unily intranet, The Hub, stood out as a result of user-friendly design, slick branding, and high adoption across the workforce. Within months of launch, the new site led to improved information sharing across the organization, helping to transform employee engagement and productivity.

Now in its 37th year, the awards are a unique opportunity for companies to gain industry recognition while also having their work evaluated against the ‘Global Standard of the Communications Profession'.

This year, close to 170 entries were submitted. Winning an IABC/Toronto OVATION Award has given Interac:

• Formal recognition of their communications excellence
• Measured success according to the global standard set by IABC
• Confirmation of the value they create
• An enriched profile and reputation to leadership and key stakeholders that demonstrates the value of strategic communication

Inside Interac’s award-winning intranet transformation

Since 1984 Interac Corp. has played an important role in developing Canada’s digital payment infrastructure and is now one of Canada’s leading payments brands, used 20 million times daily to pay and exchange money. From 2018 to 2021, the Interac workforce nearly doubled in size through growth and acquisition and was forced to shift to remote work when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, presenting challenges to the formerly office-based culture.

Realizing the significant impact this distance could have on productivity and culture, Interac got to work updating their previous SharePoint intranet solution, which required coding and manual updates, and had no mobile option or search functionality.

To support staff working from home, new digital tools were emerging rapidly across the organization – Workday, Concur, Vena, Docusign etc – without any central access point. In response to the reduction of in-person touchpoints, email increased, and company messages were getting lost. To keep its rapidly growing workforce informed, aligned, and engaged from any location, Interac needed a new ‘digital headquarters.’

In 2021, Interac overhauled its legacy intranet, replacing SharePoint with Unily’s employee experience platform to prioritize user-friendly design, mobile access, remote productivity, and seamless communications.

The site architecture and most of the content were completely rebuilt in consultation with volunteer change champions from across the company to ensure it was valuable and intuitive. The main goal was to give Interac’s employees – who are primarily information workers – everything they need to communicate, collaborate, access knowledge and expertise, and be productive from any location. The Hub has succeeded in making this possible, enabling Interac to embrace flexible, hybrid work on a permanent basis.