IRESS: 2,000 People, Email Silos, Slack Transformation

A global financial software company moved its internal communication off email and onto channels. Resolution time for its hardest client issues fell from eight days to two, and the support backlog dropped 64%. The more interesting result arrived two years later, when the person who led it had already left.

IRESS is an Australian software company that financial services firms run on: trading on global markets, financial and retirement savings advice, mortgage processing. More than half a million professionals at 9,000 businesses use its software, and nearly 2,000 employees work across 19 offices in eight countries. In 2017, a company of that size coordinated itself by email.

What followed is the clearest evidence Faiā has for the claim it now sells: adopting a technology is a cultural problem wearing a technical costume. The tool took a week to choose. The norms took two years to build.

The Problem

By 2017 IRESS had a coordination problem that email could not carry. Information arrived and then vanished. "It was all very ephemeral," says Kelly Fisk, IRESS's head of communications. "Information wasn't easily retained or usable."

The symptoms were ordinary and expensive:

Complex client issues took up to eight days to resolve, because the experts who could fix them and the support team who received them sat in different queues.
Vlad Lutschenkow, a product specialist team lead, received upward of 500 emails a day.
People logged into around 20 different applications to do their work, switching context to find the thing a conversation was about.
Company announcements, project discussion and urgent escalation all travelled the same route, so nothing was visibly owned.

None of that is unusual. Most enterprises of that size run this way. The cost is that decisions are invisible while they are being made and unfindable once they have been made, and a distributed company ends up with a culture of one team per office.

Where It Came From

The decision that mattered was made before any tool was chosen: IRESS let its people pick.

"Our users tried all the options, and told us they loved Slack," says Manqing Zhao, then head of workplace technology. Developers had adopted it early, and it spread from there rather than from a mandate. That choice did more for adoption than any rollout plan could, because the people being asked to change had already decided.

The work was led directly by George Siosi Samuels, who at the time was responsible for IRESS's internal collaboration and enterprise communities. The job was not to install software. It was to make a change of this size survivable: secure executive sponsorship early, keep it, and give the transformation named owners instead of leaving it ownerless.

This engagement predates Faiā. Faiā was founded in 2019, and the method it works from today was assembled here: read the culture first, then design the stack that culture can actually carry.

How It Worked

Discovery. Map how information actually moved — which decisions happened where, how long they took, and where they stalled. The measurement was latency, not activity: how long does a real client problem take to resolve?

Pilot. One workspace, one lighthouse team, defined channels, agreed naming, and "decision threads" where a discussion had to end in a decision and a named owner.

Integration. Slack was wired into the systems where the work already lived — ticketing, incident management, and Zoom, Jira, Confluence, GitHub and Google Drive — so people stopped leaving a conversation to go and find the thing the conversation was about. IRESS's own workplace technology team built a custom internal ticketing interface inside Slack in two weeks: Alfred bot, named after Batman's butler. It logged service desk requests and posted status updates back into the channel, which removed the reason most people avoided raising a ticket at all.

Governance and culture. Etiquette, moderation roles, and a clear separation between announcement channels and discussion channels. The chief executive, Andrew Walsh, took his own channel and posted his weekly agenda, photographs, and what he was hearing from clients and staff. Leadership being visible in the same room as everyone else did more for culture than any internal campaign would have.

Scale. Enterprise-wide rollout in stages, with analytics watching signal-to-noise and response latency rather than message volume.

The tool was the easy part. Every workflow above needed a norm attached to it, and the norms were the actual work.

What Happened

Within four months of the rollout, 62% of employees reported that Slack made them feel more connected. Across the company, more than 70% said they felt more connected to people outside their immediate team.

The operational numbers moved further than the sentiment ones:

Metric	Before	After
Resolution time, complex client issues	8 days	2 days
Customer support ticket backlog	baseline	−64%
Employees feeling more connected	—	62% within 4 months
Connectedness beyond the immediate team	—	70%+
Internal email	business-critical channel	largely eliminated

Critical issues were handled in a channel with more than 100 members who could swarm and resolve them. Channels were opened with clients, so questions arrived where they could be answered quickly instead of entering a queue. All-staff email effectively ended. Walsh removed the organisational chart entirely. "Bureaucracy is the death of agility," he said. "We emphasise a flat organisation and culture focused on how to invest in people and trust them to use their skills and intelligence to make the right decisions."

"We reduced the support ticket backlog by hundreds, and Slack played a role in that," Fisk said. Note the phrasing. Even inside the company that benefited, the credit is shared.

Proof Under Pressure

Most change programmes decay quietly once the sponsor leaves. This one was tested instead.

George left IRESS. Then, in March 2020, the pandemic shut the offices.

"Thanks to George's thought leadership and drive, Slack was rolled out across IRESS in 2018. It completely transformed how we communicated in the business. Furthermore, tight integration with Zoom, monitoring and alerting systems and internal services such as IT and HR resulted in a seamless experience for everyone. George spearheaded the whole initiative and ensured he had the full support of our exec team, which is so important when driving change and seeking adoption. I'd say the best evidence of just how important and successful this rollout had been was how seamless it all felt when the COVID pandemic hit us. Despite the world going through a difficult time, from a workplace technology perspective we were able to operate remotely without a glitch and Slack was at the heart of it. It certainly was one less thing to worry about, and looking around at how many companies were struggling with this, I realised we were very privileged to be in such a strong position."

Johan Pienaar, Executive General Manager of Operations, IRESS

That is the result worth understanding. The system held because it had stopped being a project. The norms had become the operating system and the tool had become plumbing, which is what adoption looks like when it is finished.

The Judgment Calls

Let users choose the tool. A mandate would have been faster and weaker. The people who had to change were the ones who decided what to change to.

Measure latency, not activity. Message counts flatter a rollout. Response time and backlog are what a client feels.

Pair every workflow with a norm. Decision threads, announcement channels, moderation roles. A channel without an agreed purpose becomes another inbox.

Put leadership in the same space as everyone else. A chief executive posting weekly in a public channel flattened the company more effectively than a restructure would have.

Design for your own departure. The change was built to be handed over, and it was.

What Faiā Took From It

Adoption is a culture project with a technology component. IRESS did not have a Slack problem or an email problem. It had a coordination culture its tools could no longer carry.

A sponsor opens the door; norms keep it open. Executive support got the rollout permitted. What kept it alive after the people who championed it had moved on was the daily behaviour it had trained.

The best proof arrives after the engagement ends. The strongest evidence for this work is a company operating normally through a crisis, years later, without the person who led it in the room. That is the outcome worth selling, and it is the one a vendor cannot promise.

Numbers need baselines and named owners. Eight days to two days means something because both ends were measured and a team owned the result.

Being first is a position, not a result. IRESS became Slack's first enterprise customer in Asia-Pacific. The interesting part was never being first. It was that the choice survived contact with 2,000 people.