AFFIN Bank Berhad won the Best Digital HR category at the recent 2025–2026 HR Stars Awards Malaysia, proving that a modern workspace is most effective when it moves away from slow, spreadsheet-driven processes. This award acknowledges the bank’s successful deployment of an advanced cloud ecosystem. This digital setup is not just an incremental IT upgrade but a deliberate group-wide strategy to future-proof operations, elevate employee lifecycle management, and establish human resources as an active business advisor.
The technical foundation of this transformation centres on the bank’s migration to Workday HCM as its single, group-wide source of truth. This core platform successfully integrates essential human capital functions, including recruitment, automated onboarding, self-service leave management, and compensation tracking under a unified dashboard. To further enhance daily efficiency, the bank combined this core system with robotic process automation. This step eliminated repetitive, error-prone tasks, meaning that critical workflows like recruitment milestones and the issuance of employee bonus letters are now handled via automated execution.
Their platform shifts employee feedback from an occasional exercise into an ongoing, data-driven conversation. By utilising Workday Peakon Employee Voice, managers no longer rely on conventional, retrospective yearly surveys. Instead, they monitor live dashboards that track shifting trends across clear engagement drivers, such as workload distribution, professional growth opportunities, and organisational strategy alignment. This transparent communication loop enables managers to co-create practical, documented micro-actions during regular team huddles, a process that has driven an employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) of 20.
To ensure this digital ecosystem evolves alongside changing workforce habits, the bank expanded its platform functionality in January 2026 by rolling out mobile-friendly Workday Expense modules alongside a fully integrated Ramco payroll solution. This integration allows staff to scan receipts via mobile tools and receive instant visibility into spending against corporate budgets while securing accurate, timely monthly payouts. Real-time operational data gathered from these systems gives human resource practitioners complete visibility into approval cadences and processing bottlenecks, allowing the bank to make talent decisions based on live evidence rather than basic guesswork.
