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 oversees financial reporting, transaction services and strategic partnering with Fairfax businesses globally.
Over time, the headcount in Ireland ( ffh Management Services ) grew to 75 people, with a professional and academic team that have supported the business. 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. That could include 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. From scoping and mapping through migration and go-live, that continuity was key to FFH’s final decision: senior leadership effectively said: “We’ll do it if it’s you.”
“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. He can dial it up to where he needs to be. It was the best in class package.”
Once the tender was agreed around June, implementation planning began. Grouper and FFH structured the work using a Microsoft Project plan and a tightly managed cadence of calls twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays.
Full migration for all of FFH’s data got underway in September. Moji walked the team through the process of data mapping and migration from the Excel-based records into the new HR platform. During this stage, the project team also decided what data to bring forward and what to leave behind, incorporating GDPR-aware housekeeping such as archiving or deleting older CVs and redundant data.
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 in the first week of December 2025, 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, and even branded merchandise to mark the occasion and drive engagement.
“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 empowered through the system’s self-service features, the HR team now spends more time on strategic work, including building relationships with employees and directors; supporting staff career development and progression, aligning the people agenda with FFH’s three-year strategic plan; and being more responsive to global changes affecting the workforce.
“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. HR has shifted from being operational and busy to being more value-added and relationship-driven because you can spend the time with people.”
FFH is now in Phase 2 of the project, expanding use of its new HR system to include the recruitment module and engagement surveys. This will allow the company to gain bespoke, targeted feedback from its Irish team in-house without needing to outsource surveys as it had done before. This will save costs by using tools already included in the package that Grouper provides and supports.
In Ciara’s words, the transformation simply “wouldn’t 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.
