Questrade Financial Group transforms productivity using Google Workspace with Gemini

The mission and challenge

Questrade Financial Group provides securities and foreign currency investment, professionally managed investment portfolios, mortgages, insurance, real estate services, financial services, and more, in pursuit of their mission to help Canadians become more financially successful. Their innovative, customer-centric approach allows them to offer better, simpler, and more cost-effective ways for customers to take control of their money. 

They’re innovative with technology, too, both to provide better services to customers and to improve how they work, which is why they adopted Google Workspace as their productivity and collaboration platform in 2019. When the pandemic hit, Workspace put them ahead of the curve. The platform empowered employees to communicate, collaborate, and work effectively to continue delivering the financial services their customers expect. 

Having established a strong collaborative foundation in Workspace, they continued to explore new technologies to give them a competitive edge. They soon realized that embedding generative AI into operations was the logical next step. As a financial services organization, they take the security of data incredibly seriously, so they needed a solution that would keep data private and secure. The fact that Gemini wouldn’t use their data to train its models gave them the confidence that they could use it securely and their data would remain their own. 

The switch to Gemini

They implemented Gemini for its potential to transform how teams work and deliver even more effective services for customers. By working with cloud solutions consultancy and Google Premier Partner SADA, An Insight company, they were able to speed up the launch of their pilot. They joined the Gemini early adopter program and gave access to a select group of tech-forward pioneers from across the organization, who became Questrade AI Innovators. To ensure a smooth and successful trial experience for these Gemini early adopters, SADA implemented a comprehensive change management program. This program included multiple training sessions, answering users’ questions during office hours, weekly tips and videos, engaging trial participants in a dedicated Google Chat space, and collecting responses from surveys to let them measure their progress in Gemini adoption. This helped prove the value of the tool, enabling them to roll out Gemini with confidence across the company.

The internal AI enablement and change team provided invaluable support as they did so. They also leveraged the expertise of their AI Innovators to guide new Gemini users. To ensure relevance for all, they developed custom training tailored to each department. These sessions covered essential topics like prompt engineering, included role-play scenarios specifically for the mortgage team, and demonstrated how their executive team could utilize Gemini to extract instant insights from complex financial statements.

Employees now use Gemini to streamline time-consuming and repetitive tasks, giving them more time to focus on strategic initiatives. For example, teams use Gemini to generate speaker notes for Google Slides presentations, brainstorm ideas, conduct comprehensive research, and summarize lengthy documents. They also use it to synthesize information from various files on Google Drive, saving them considerable time when searching  for relevant material. Meanwhile, when employees need to consume lengthy reports, they can use NotebookLM to generate an engaging audio version of the material, which they can listen to while performing other tasks, boosting their productivity.

Gemini has also helped enhance how they communicate. Employees use Gems to write content—a blog post, for example, that might have previously taken two days to research and write can now be drafted in a couple of hours. Meanwhile, users with English as a second language use Gemini to quickly draft English-language emails without worrying about making mistakes, which puts them on an equal footing with native English speakers. Gemini democratizes coding too, enabling less technical users to easily create intelligent applications with AppSheet, helping build solutions and workflows that would previously have taken hours in a matter of minutes.

Looking ahead

As they expand and explore their use of Gemini, they continue to offer customized training sessions to teams to ensure every department can make the most of this technology’s potential. They’re building on existing use cases, such as their generation of audio content with NotebookLM, and creating more Gems to increase creativity and productivity. At the same time, they’re excited to discover new and exciting use cases to increase productivity and efficiency and enable staff to focus more time on strategic and client-facing initiatives. 

While they’re still early in the adoption of Gemini, as they look to the future, it’s rapidly changing their sense of what’s possible. Their two- to three-year goals now feel more like six-month goals, because Gemini helps them work smarter, compress timelines, and bring objectives nearer. Ultimately, Gemini empowers them to dream bigger as an organization, making it a very exciting time for Questrade.