How St. James's Place made digital learning production more efficient and reduced costs

We spoke with Beverley Hares, Head of Digital Learning Content and Karen Weeks, Head of Programme Management at St. James’s Place (SJP). They shared how they deliver digital learning content using a variety of media assets, including AI video in a highly regulated industry.

50%

time savings

75%

cost savings

St. James's Place is a leading wealth management firm, serving over 900,000 clients with tailored financial advice and investment solutions. It focuses on personalized strategies and long-term relationships to help clients achieve their financial goals.

Industry
Financial Services
Headquarters
UK
Company size
Enterprise: 1000+

Industry Context

Wealth management firms face constant regulatory change, requiring fast, consistent training updates. Traditional production is too slow and text-based formats lack engagement, increasing the risk of missed messages.

The Challenge

SJP L&D are responsible for creating training materials that cover technical content, soft skills, and compliance training. Their ultimate goal is to drive behaviors that develop the business through engaging content.

As a financial institution, St. James's Place (SJP) operates in a highly regulated environment, often requiring frequent content updates to comply with new regulations and guidelines. The need for speed and accuracy in meeting these requirements created significant challenges:

Long production cycles: Traditional digital learning development can require lengthy production cycles, making it resource intensive to keep pace with frequent regulatory changes.
Expensive external video productions: Increased demand for digital content required costly outsourcing for video production that often needed annual updates.
Inability for quick updates: Traditional video content is difficult to modify, making it poorly suited for compliance training that need regular revisions.
Having to default to text: To accommodate quick updates, the team often relies on text-based materials, making compliance topics less engaging than they would be in video format.

When updating regulatory content on a quarterly basis, it is very important to be able to make changes quickly and accurately - those tight timescales are hard to meet when trying to record actual video.

Beverley Hares, Head of Digital Learning Content

The Solution

Using Synthesia, the team now creates engaging videos quickly and easily, without requiring technical expertise in design or video development. They adopt a multi-module approach, combining AI video with evergreen real-life videos, quizzes, and text materials. Their process is straightforward:

The team crafts a script, uploads it to Synthesia, adds content and avatars to each scene, and after review, the video is ready to deploy.
When updates are needed, the team can quickly return to the video draft, make adjustments, and generate new content that complies with SME and Stakeholder requirements – all without expensive reshoots.

This is what the team appreciates most about Synthesia:

Version control: With version control, the team can track video iterations and maintain a clear history of updates to meet all requirements.
Editing flexibility: With Synthesia, the team can efficiently update all training videos with a simple script edit and regeneration.
Multiple avatars: The team can create simulated dialogues between multiple avatars in one scene, making training content more dynamic and engaging.
Avatar quality: Synthesia avatars present regulated technical and skills content professionally and neutrally, ensuring effective, unbiased delivery.

The Results

Since using Synthesia for creating training videos, the team has seen impressive results:

Increased completion rates: Since replacing a text-only approach with video, the team has seen noticeable improvements in completion rates.
Time savings: Since using Synthesia, the team can turn around new videos or edit videos around 50% faster than before.
Cost savings: The team can now update videos for any changes without relying on videographers, editors or external production, avoiding expenses like travel, studio, and more, thereby cutting costs by up to 75%.

We’ve seen an increase in team productivity and were able to reduce costs.

Karen Weeks, Head of Programme Management