Aligned, Accountable, and Flexible: How Arcesium Scaled Performance with Betterworks
COMPANY
Arcesium is a global financial technology and services firm founded in 2015. With 2,500+ employees worldwide, Arcesium builds advanced data, operations, and analytics platforms for leading financial institutions. The company’s culture emphasizes transparency, flexibility, and continuous improvement.
INDUSTRY
Financial Technology / Services
EMPLOYEE COUNT AND COUNTRIES
2,500+ employees across North America, Europe, and Asia
HEADQUARTERS
New York, USA
We wanted to ensure there is transparency, visibility, and alignment across the firm for all the big, audacious goals that matter to us, and we realized that Betterworks is one of the best platforms that can help us turn this philosophy into reality for our employees.
Vincy Philip
Vice President, Organization Design & Talent Development
Arcesium
Challenges
Since its founding, Arcesium has experienced rapid growth globally. As scale increased, the traditional approach to goal management couldn’t deliver the alignment, visibility, and accountability the firm expected from performance. Leadership set out to modernize how goals were set, how progress was discussed, and how culture showed up in the workflow.
Arcesium sought to:
Move from traditional goal management and reviews to transparent, firm-wide OKRs, managed alongside performance in a single platform.
Build transparency and accountability while maintaining flexibility across distinct business units.
Create globally consistent processes that respect local needs and culture.
Solution
Arcesium adopted Betterworks to move to OKRs and embed continuous performance practices across the organization. Starting with global OKRs and quarterly check-ins, the rollout expanded through team-specific pilots. Leaders modeled the change through town halls and blog posts, and the review process was refined to better connect goals to outcomes. Employees use guides to craft more effective responses to the quarterly, mid-year, and annual review question. Managers also use in‑product Guides to convert development needs into training requests at review time for select locations.
The performance process now runs on a January–December cycle and features:
Quarterly OKR check‑ins
Mid-year performance review for management
Annual review with self-assessments, feedback to and from managers, and 360-style feedback
Goal Alignment
Annual goal setting and quarterly OKR reviews happen in the flow of work, with transparent, aligned, and visible OKRs cascading from leadership.
Conversations
Regular manager-employee conversations about progress and development keep performance visible and reinforce accountability.
What was different about the world [before Betterworks] was it was more siloed… . The point of view of an employee was limited, potentially to the most important targets and metrics in their own world.
…in a post-Betterworks world, what it has helped employees understand is that, yes, you are part of a business unit. There are goals [and] there are metrics that are important to you, but you are part of a whole, and it’s important for you to know what that whole means.
Vincy Philip
Vice President, Organization Design & Talent Development
Arcesium
Results
Tools and practices, including OKRs and regular conversations, have helped Arcesium maintain clarity and accountability while scaling globally. The outcome has been higher consistency, stronger alignment, and a culture of ownership.
Near-total completion
97–98% completion rates for annual and mid-year reviews.
Strengthened transparency
Public-by-default OKRs give employees visibility into firm-wide priorities and progress.
Managers improving
Upward-feedback scores for “giving feedback” rose after focused training.
Empowered workforce
Employees and leaders report greater autonomy to set, track, and discuss goals.
Hear From Arcesium
Vincy Philip, Vice President of Organization Design & Talent Development, shares insights about partnering with Betterworks and the transformative impact on Arcesium’s performance culture.
“This video captures the essence of our partnership—how Betterworks helped us build a culture of transparency and accountability while scaling globally.”
Details
Arcesium’s performance philosophy reflects its values of transparency, accountability, and flexibility, with process discipline to match the scale of its business.
This approach has driven a cultural shift. People can see how their work ladders to firm‑wide goals. Managers are equipped to coach, and leaders can adapt processes without sacrificing alignment.
Leader communications
Leadership crafts firm‑wide OKRs together and then explains the “why” in dedicated town halls and blog posts, followed by quarterly progress updates to sustain attention and learning.
Manager enablement
Quarterly check‑ins make feedback part of the job. Upward feedback and insights reveal trends and target training. Guides link development needs directly to training requests.
Global consistency, local flexibility
Business units pilot program variations that may be spun up firm-wide, but also have the ability to adjust processes to meet the business unit's needs. Behind the scenes, HR maintains multiple forms and reports, while the end‑user experience remains seamless.
The Bottom Line
Arcesium’s story is one of evolution: from a KPI-based past to a global OKR-driven future, where performance is measured by meaningful outcomes, not just activity. With Betterworks, the company built a globally consistent yet flexible system that weaves transparency, accountability, and development into the flow of work. It ultimately enables an aligned, fast‑moving organization that’s ready for what’s next.
See how Betterworks can help your organization align goals, empower managers, and build a culture of accountability.
