How Northern Trust is unifying its workplace experience
As hybrid work reshapes the financial sector, Northern Trust is setting a new precedent for digital employee experience – signalling a broader shift towards experience-led innovation
In the highly regulated, high-performing world of financial services, the workplace has an important role in enabling employees to perform at their best. Yet, strict compliance requirements, legacy systems, and security concerns have often kept innovation at arm’s length.
As hybrid work reshapes expectations around flexibility and connection, even the most traditional institutions are rethinking how technology can better serve their people. Northern Trust’s latest initiative is a clear signal of that shift.
Partnering with Modo Labs, Northern Trust has developed a workplace experience platform that brings together flexible seating, wayfinding, colleague visibility and communication into a single mobile app. One year on, the results reveal operational efficiency gains and a cultural shift in how technology can connect people to place and purpose.
Remapping the employee journey
Before the platform’s introduction, Northern Trust’s on-site systems were not designed for the flexibility of a hybrid workforce. Employees often faced friction in finding colleagues, navigating offices and accessing information which eroded both time and engagement. The new app changes that dynamic, creating a unified experience that is globally consistent yet locally relevant.
From desk booking and navigation to office news and events, the platform acts as a digital gateway to the organisation’s physical spaces. Its most notable impact lies in its ability to enhance visibility and connection. Through features such as Modo My Circle™, employees can coordinate in-office days and regain a sense of community that can easily be lost in dispersed teams.
From efficiency to engagement
While the platform has achieved measurable outcomes including significant time savings and reduced administrative complexity, its deeper success lies in reframing technology as a cultural enabler. ‘Usability, cost, data security, and ease of implementation were all important,’ said Mitchell Bobman, Vice President of Workplace Technology at Northern Trust. ‘But what really mattered was creating a cohesive workplace experience that supports how people actually work today.’
A sector-wide inflection point
As financial institutions face pressures around talent retention, cost optimisation and wellbeing, technology platforms like Northern Trust’s signal an evolution in priorities. Rather than focusing solely on efficiency, the emphasis is shifting towards experience-led design where digital systems are built to humanise hybrid work rather than manage it.
For Modo Labs, the Northern Trust partnership underscores a wider trend. ‘Organisations are looking for workplace platforms that don’t just solve single problems but integrate the entire experience,’ said Sean Kae, CEO of Modo Labs. ‘The goal is not just to make work easier, but to make it more meaningful.’
As hybrid work continues to reshape expectations, the institutions that thrive will be those that see technology not as a tool for control, but as a platform for culture. Northern Trust’s approach suggests that the future of financial services may depend as much on how organisations enable experience as on how they manage capital.
