Fairfax Financial Holdings is a Canadian company providing property and casualty insurance and reinsurance and the associated investment management services. It set up an operation in Dublin 20 years ago to support its head office in Toronto. Today, the Irish office, trading as ffh Management Services, oversees financial reporting, transaction services and strategic partnering with Fairfax businesses globally.
Over time, the headcount in Ireland grew to 75 people. When Ciara Byrnes joined the company as head of HR in 2024, she inherited a patchwork of Excel spreadsheets and a basic performance management tool inside the existing HRIS.
This setup had reached its limits for a globally connected business. Core HR data across the entire employee lifecycle was scattered and manually maintained, covering everything from job descriptions, CVs, job profiles and contracts, to induction plans, training plans, performance reviews, compensation updates, payroll information, and offboarding details.
Managing this information was time-consuming, error-prone, and heavily admin-driven, leaving little time for strategic HR partnering. FFH decided it was time for its first fully fledged HRIS, and went to market.
Drawing on her prior experience with HR platforms, Ciara evaluated three different systems, and Grouper impressed throughout this process. The differentiator was not price but presence: Grouper assigned a dedicated senior consultant to FFH, Moji Akbari, who would steer the entire project from beginning to end.
"One of the key hooks was that Moji said he would be there from the beginning to the end," Ciara explains. "In a lot of transactions, the seller isn't involved in the transformation. Moji is quite unique in his field because he gets into the mind of the HR practitioners but he also understands the business, and he's also very technical. It was the best-in-class package."
Once the tender was agreed, implementation planning began. Grouper and FFH structured the work using a Microsoft Project plan and a tightly managed cadence of calls twice a week. Full migration for all of FFH's data got underway in September, with Moji walking the team through the process of data mapping and migration from the Excel-based records into the new HR platform.
Another key aim of the project was to create a self-service model where employees could update their own personal information, access documents, and view key HR data directly in the platform. The project culminated in a soft go-live on time and on budget. Grouper supported a high-impact internal launch with in-person training and a white-glove onboarding experience for employees that included training on using the new platform.
"Systems come and go and people can work through handovers but there's something very unique about how passionate and capable Moji is. He's been in the office and he's met and trained everybody. That level of consulting, you don't find everywhere," Ciara says.
Post-implementation, FFH's HR team has shifted from manual, tactile work to what Ciara calls gold-standard HR partnering. With admin tasks heavily automated and employees enabled through the system's self-service features, the HR team now spends more time on strategic work, including building relationships with employees and directors and supporting staff career development and progression.
"Once you take out all the manual and tactile work, you can lift your head and see the landscape of what we're trying to achieve here. We have a three-year strategic plan, and we can scale that plan, work more with the businesses that we support and be available to them. This platform gives us more hours in the day where we're doing meaningful work."
In Ciara's words, the transformation simply would not have happened without Moji. Grouper's attentive customer service, continuity of ownership, and meticulous project management turned a manual, spreadsheet-heavy environment into a modern HR function that better serves the business and its people.
