• Enables seamless integration to meet mergers and acquisition target with user-friendly Google Workspace tools

• Enhances operational efficiencies and productivity by reducing meeting times by 40%

• Supports mission of employee wellbeing and work-life balance by enabling 4-day workweek

• Bolsters customer financial data protection with Workspace DLP rule settings

Indonesia is the world's biggest Muslim-majority country, with roughly 230 million believers accounting for nearly 87% of the population. The vast archipelago nation is also one of Asia's most dynamic economies, growing at a rate of more than five percent per year and well on the road from middle- to high-income status.

Stepping into this picture of faith and aspiration, Hijra launched in 2018 under its original name ALAMI, on a mission to use digital technology to foster a prosperous society based on sharia principles. Aiming to empower communities and promote equality, Hijra offers a convenient, safe and easy way to manage money, invest or gain access to sharia financing.

Hijra started as a peer-to-peer lending service before acquiring a sharia rural bank in 2021 and transforming it into Hijra Bank, Indonesia's sharia digital mobile banking platform.

In its early days, Hijra employed a variety of productivity and collaboration tools from multiple vendors, with different solutions for email, spreadsheets, word processing, scheduling and video conferencing. It soon found itself struggling to manage communication, drive creative collaboration, and centralize and secure information with often incompatible tools.

Working with partner EIKON, Hijra decided in 2020 to migrate to a Google Workspace enterprise plan. It foresaw the urgent need for optimized workflows on a centralized cloud-based collaboration platform as it planned its transformation into a full-fledged digital bank. By embracing Google Workspace, Hijra achieved seamless integration with its acquired bank and gained "transformative abilities" to drive its mission of empowering Indonesia's Muslims.

"Our customers want to uplift their futures by contributing to society through ethical values," says Harza Sandityo, Co-Founder Hijra & President Director ALAMI P2P Lending Sharia. "The more Google Workspace helps our team work collaboratively and improve productivity, the faster we help Indonesians achieve their dreams."

When Hijra carried out its bank takeover in 2021, it encountered a traditional corporate culture in the target company that relied on manual processes, a contrast to its own cloud-based workflows. Yet integrating the two companies on Google Workspace was "surprisingly easy and frictionless" according to Sandityo, due to the intuitive user-interfaces of Google Workspace solutions, and proactive training from EIKON. Soon the teams were working together as one on solutions such as Docs, Sheets, Google Meet and Drive, developing a common enterprise culture based on real-time collaboration.

EIKON played an instrumental role in facilitating this integration by deploying its technical expertise to rapidly merge the email accounts of the two entities into a unified Gmail based domain. "One of the biggest contributions that came from EIKON was to execute email domain merging," says Sandityo. "By carrying out the complex procedure within four weeks, we were easily able to share documents across the entire team, without the cumbersome process of needing to invite people from the other domain one-by-one."

One of the innovative uses of Google Workspace at Hijra is the introduction of a system it calls "silent meetings." Here strategic teams distributed across Indonesia attend an online meeting to review monthly Objectives and Key Results (OKR) reports on Docs. In the first 15 minutes of each meeting, participants communicate solely by contributing written comments on the Doc to reach overall consensus on content. After this stage, a Meet session may be held to talk through any unresolved issues.

The efficiencies enabled by this imaginative and collaborative use of Docs and Meet surpassed Hijra's expectations. The "silent meeting" system has enabled it to reduce the time it spends on meetings by 40%, says Sandityo, through the "focused attention enabled by a Docs collaborative environment."

Through effective use of Google Workspace tools such as Docs and Sheets, Hijra strategy teams have slashed the time required to produce OKR reports from roughly two months to two weeks. Such workflow enhancements have enabled Hijra to maintain a commitment to a four-day workweek, supporting employee wellbeing and work-life balance.

According to Sandityo, adoption of Google Workspace has even become an enabler of talent acquisition. He says younger, digitally-native prospects arriving for job interviews are increasingly expressing preference for Google Workspace as their online work environment.

"In the talent marketplace, candidates are starting to ask us whether we use Google Workspace in the company," says Sandityo. "They prefer it and that helps us attract the best workers."

As an online bank, Hijra handles huge amounts of sensitive customer financial information every day. This must be shared across the organization and with external partners, in a way that guarantees the utmost security and privacy of the personal data.

To optimize its data protection protocols, Hijra was advised by partner EIKON to deploy Workspace DLP (Data Loss Prevention) as a powerful solution to create rules that control the content users can share outside the organization.

Workspace DLP enables organizations to establish precise rules regarding what data users can share, and prevents unintended exposure of sensitive information such as credit card numbers or identity numbers. The solution scans content for Workspace DLP rule violations and triggers alerts whenever a risk emerges.

"Workspace DLP is essential for us to protect our customer data, which is our number one security priority," says Sandityo. "Another critical thing it does is protect our strategy from being exposed to the outside world. This enables us to keep creating innovative sharia fin-tech solutions with confidence and peace of mind."

Today, Hijra is driving its empowerment strategy with the aim to rapidly scale its solution across the Indonesian archipelago, enabling more Muslims to improve their lives and society through digitally-enabled sharia finance.

"The penetration of Islamic banking in Indonesia is still under 10% so there's massive room for growth," says Sandityo. "With creative synergies and productivity enhancements from Google Workspace, we have the tools necessary to continue doing good."