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CUSTOMER STORIES

How a Leading Australian Financial Services Firm Saved $18M Over 3 Years

INDUSTRY:
Financial Services
IMPLEMENTATION:
Full-building Deployment
COMPANY SIZE:
3,000+ Employees
KEY RESULT:
$18M Saved Over 3 Years
USE CASE:
Portfolio Right-Sizing

The Challenge

An Australian financial services firm recently signed a head office lease and invested heavily in building out a workplace designed to be future-fit and purpose-built. The initial design was based on calculated assumptions about how much space was needed, but leadership knew they needed real data to validate those assumptions.

Across 14 floors, 40% of workspace was bookable while 60% was open and non-bookable - designed as destination zones and project spaces. The firm needed to understand whether this ratio was right, whether they had excess capacity, and whether there was an opportunity to renegotiate their lease commitment.

Additionally, desk booking behavior was creating friction: sensors showed 95% of desks were booked, but 50% were actually available. Employees were booking in advance and not canceling, leaving belongings behind and rendering the spaces as passively occupied, creating a perception of full floors that didn’t match reality.

The Solution

The firm deployed VergeSense across the entire 14-floor headquarters to track real-time occupancy alongside booking data. The data proved pivotal in a lease renegotiation: it demonstrated that the firm had more than enough space and could comfortably eliminate three lower floors.

During the transition from 14 to 11 floors, VergeSense data enabled the workplace team to recalibrate neighborhoods, manage change with data rather than perception, and demonstrate to concerned leaders that even peak-day occupancy was manageable with adjusted behavior.

The firm also activated Space Booking Automation with their O365 calendar integration, implementing auto check-in and auto-release for desks and meeting rooms. This addressed the booking-vs-reality gap and freed up hundreds of hours of meeting time per week.

$18M

Saved Over 3 Years

3 Floors

Safely Eliminated

100s Hrs/wk

Meeting Time Reclaimed

This right-sizing exercise delivered $18M in savings over three years. Not only was the reduction from 14 to 11 floors completed seamlessly, employee experience scores actually increasing post-transition.

Booking automation reclaimed hundreds of hours of meeting room availability weekly and resolved the ghost-booking problem. The workplace team now uses VergeSense data to manage catering and hospitality (adjusting food delivery by floor based on peak-day data), housekeeping schedules, and ongoing space design iterations.