The System Doesn't Have Favorites
Retail Bank with Branch Network
At a Glance
In a decentralized branch banking network, regional managers held significant authority over investigations in their territory. When an allegation involved a branch manager, the regional manager was typically the one to investigate. The problem was obvious to everyone except the people doing the investigating: regional managers were closing cases on their friends and favorite branch managers with suspicious speed and consistently favorable outcomes.
Internal audit flagged the pattern. Cases involving branch managers had significantly shorter investigation timelines and lower substantiation rates than cases involving lower-level employees. The data suggested that personal relationships were influencing outcomes, but the existing process had no safeguard against it.
The bank implemented a straightforward but powerful workflow rule within Ethico: any case where the subject was identified as a branch manager or above was automatically routed to Corporate Employee Relations, bypassing the regional management chain entirely.
The rule was non-negotiable and non-overridable at the regional level. When a report came in and the subject's role matched the trigger criteria, the system routed it immediately. The regional manager never saw the case in their queue. They could not reassign it, delay it, or close it. Corporate Employee Relations handled the investigation with full independence.
Post-launch, bias complaints in internal audit reviews dropped to zero. The metric was telling not because bias had been eliminated from human nature but because the system had eliminated the structural conditions that allowed bias to influence outcomes.
Investigation timelines and substantiation rates for branch manager cases normalized to match the rates for all other employee levels, confirming that the previous disparity had been driven by the investigator's relationship with the subject rather than by any genuine difference in case merit.
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