This morning, Anessa Chui–VP of Human Resources-Onboarding and Program Management at Credit Suisse–spoke from the main stage at Opportunity’s annual conference. Credit Suisse, a strategic partner to Opportunity International, is the generous sponsor of our conference this year. Anessa visited Opportunity’s operations in Uganda as part of Credit Suisse’s Global Citizens Program, examining the branches’ processes and working with staff to make the banks as efficient and effective as they can be.

Highlights from Anessa Chui’s Presentation

I’d like to start by telling you about Credit Suisse’s corporate citizenship. It’s integrated into the way we work and the way we operate. Our corporate citizenship model focuses on education and microfinance. In microfinance, we have a long history in the industry, and we have become the capacity building leader in microfinance.

This capacity building initiative–the Global Citizens Program–was the program that brought me to Uganda. What I saw in Uganda was that sometimes it’s the simplest solutions that make the greatest impact. I think more creatively about solutions now. I hope I was able to show Ugandan staff how to look at problems from a process perspective, so that they can support more customers. I also shared with them that bigger corporations face the same issues of increasing efficiency as they do.

It’s good that we can share best practices, but ultimately for capacity building initiatives to be successful, they need to remain after you leave. It’s all about making them stick. I would like to thank the staff for working with me and for being so open to change.

A bit about Anessa Chui

Anessa Chui is VP of human resources—onboarding and program management for Credit Suisse in Asia Pacific, based in Hong Kong. Prior to this role she spent three and a half years with the CS Operational Excellence team, where she was a program advisor and senior change manager. Before joining Credit Suisse in September 2007, her roles include being senior project manager at HSBC and a relationship executive at HSBC Australia, Ltd. In 2010, Anessa was selected for Credit Suisse’s Global Citizens Program to work alongside Opportunity’s bank in Uganda for three months. She was part of a team that evaluated and set up “Best Banking and Operational Practices” and created a manual that documents process and best practices, which has helped Opportunity Uganda become more efficient across its branches. Anessa holds a bachelor of commerce degree from the University of Melbourne, Australia and a B.A. from Monash University, Australia. She is also a certified Lean Sigma Black Belt project leader.

This session was streamed live at opportunity.org/live. Visit opportunity.org/live during the conference to watch it live.