The Sonovate-HowNow partnership was formed in 2021 and over the past five years, the HowNow team has witnessed Sonovate’s exponential growth, with the company increasing its total invoices funded from £2bn to £6bn.
This rapid growth is a strong testament to Sonovate’s innovative culture and flexible funding solutions. But fast growth also creates challenges.
To learn more about Sonovate’s scaleup journey and the criticality of effective training and upskilling, we recently spoke to the company’s Development and Opportunity Partner, Jen Parker.
We started by asking Jen about the challenges that existed prior to engaging HowNow…
Existing challenges:
Beyond choosing the right systems and tools to support compliance training, the Sonovate team was also looking to embed a continuous learning culture that would support business growth.
✔ Embed a growth mindset culture across the business
✔ Ensure consistently relevant, engaging and valuable learning content
✔ Create one central, easy-to-access learning hub that integrates with other business systems (i.e HRIS)
✔ Relieve L&D bottlenecks and delay by providing employees with effective learning on demand (mandatory and non-mandatory)
✔ Support employee onboarding to ensure compliance and reduce time to productivity
After a competitive tender that included several learning tech providers, the Sonovate team chose HowNow. Jen explains: “What drew our team to HowNow was its ability for everyone in the business to create their own learning content. That was one of Sonovate’s top priorities in terms of selection criteria and HowNow definitely supports that.”
✔ Employees are able to create and share their own learning content
✔ HowNow+ learning library supports everything from compliance training to soft skills
✔ Self-directed learning on demand
✔ Pathways feature helps employees to define and understand their learning journeys
✔ Agile partner with a flexible design
Fast forward to today, and Jen cites HowNow’s agile culture and flexible design as lasting benefits: “The platform is really flexible, which gives us the ability to use it as we want to based on our evolving needs and wants. HowNow is also continuing to develop its platform by offering new features such as Guru, their AI workplace coach. That mirrors our own culture of innovation and agility…and so it provides a good fit.”
That “fit” is more than just synergy and shared mindsets, however. It’s actually delivering real impact in the form of measurable outcomes:
Throughout 2025, on average, 61% of employees engaged with the HowNow platform every month. This sustained engagement beats the industry benchmark (60%) and illustrates the value that HowNow is delivering for Sonovate’s employees.
Jen explains: “We’re seeing very good engagement with the platform. This is partly due to mandatory training, which is all done through HowNow, but it’s also because individual teams are using the platform to create and store their own knowledge.”
The Sonovate team has also achieved its goal of creating one central learning hub that integrates with other business systems. HowNow is fully integrated with Sonovate’s HRIS (HiBob), for example, ensuring a more transparent and joined up people experience.
“[HowNow] has become a hub that our people are able to access and revisit whenever they need to refresh their knowledge or source new information. That was a key goal that we’ve been able to achieve,” says Jen.
Ensuring compliance, especially in a complex industry such as financial services, is no mean feat. Add rapid growth into that mix and it becomes even more challenging. But compliance isn’t optional, it’s imperative – and HowNow is playing a key role in facilitating this for Sonovate. By standardising compliance training, all in one place, Jen and the L&D team now have a real-time view of training completion, and a single source of truth with actionable insights.
“HowNow has empowered our people to create and store their own content, which means that over the past five years we’ve been able to build an extensive library for internal learning content. This is hugely valuable and will ensure that our company knowledge remains within the business for the long term.”
So what’s next for the Sonovate-HowNow partnership?
Having already started to put Guru, HowNow’s AI coach to work, Jen explains that the team is excited about its potential: “We made it [Guru] available to our business analysts first because it’s able to process very high level notes and information…it can sift through large volumes of data to answer a specific question and that’s been really helpful so far. In fact, in the past twenty minutes alone, I’ve had three or four notifications to say that our pilot users are interacting with Guru.”
We also asked Jen about her experience as a HowNow customer: “Our main point of contact is Lulu and she’s always available…we’ve always found our relationship managers to be very responsive. They take the time to listen and understand what we’re trying to achieve before they point us in any one direction, and that makes for a strong partnership.”
If you’re looking to support business growth with skills-first learning, contact the HowNow team today, or book your demo. We’d love to hear from you!
