Workplace by Facebook, the social media company’s collaborative enterprise communications platform, has won a contract with Zurich Insurance Group that is seeing the tool rolled out to over 50,000 employees in 36 countries.

The news comes a week after Facebook announced that the tool, which is priced at $3/month per user for its premium product, had secured ISO 27018 certification to add to the ISO 27001 accreditation it achieved in October 2017.

ISO 27018 is a privacy-focussed international standard that establishes controls and guidelines to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in public cloud computing environments. (ISO 27001 meanwhile is one of the best known standard for implementing an Information Security Management System).

Why Facebook?

Zurich, which has a market capitalisation of 44.9 billion Swiss francs (£36 billion) at time of publication, declined to tell Computer Business Review which other collaborative tools it had considered, but attributed the decision to Workplace by Facebook’s intuitive nature. The company had previously relied primarily on email.

Francis Bouchard, Zurich’s head of comms, told Computer Business Review in a call: “There was a day in the past in which the tools you would get at work were far superior to the ones you’d get at home. That has now changed and many younger workers are far more digitally engaged with the platforms they use socially.”

“We needed to modernise the suite of tools we offer our employees and the standout issue was the intuitive nature of it; people are familiar with the mechanics of the platform. It’s early days, but engagement is extremely high and it has improved transparency across the group as well as collaboration.”

He added that four weeks into the roll-out, approximately one third of the company’s employees were enrolled.

See also: “Workplace by Facebook” Rolls Out Raft of New Features

Workplace by Facebook’s other new customers include GSK, Astra Zeneca, BaoViet Bank, City of Oslo and the Government of Singapore.

The company, which competes with rivals like Microsoft Teams and Slack, says it hosts Workplace Won Facebook’s highly available, globally distributed infrastructure, and it has a target recovery time objective (RTO) of zero, and a target recovery point objective (RPO) of zero.” The company says it is GDPR-compliant.

It’s premium package comes with a range of APIs for custom integrations and bots; integrations with e-discovery and compliance providers; single sign-on (SSO), Active Directory support and integration with G Suite, Okta, Windows Azure AD and more.