Royal Bank of Scotland is first bank to sign up employees to Facebook At Work

Facebook announced that employees at the Royal Bank of Scotland will sign up for Facebook At Work.  The bank company plans to have 30,000 workers sign up on  Facebook At Work network by March next year, and 100,000 of its employees will use the platform by the end of 2016.

Facebook At Work offers a close environment on social media, limited to the enterprise's employees and with enhanced security.

According to the Financial Times, all the data saved in the application belongs to the employer and is not mined for advertisements, as on the Facebook main site.

The data saved on this platform is treated as highly confidential and encrypted. But Facebook can sometimes obtain information from the data in the network with a subpoena.

On Tech Crunch, the director of global platform partnerships at Facebook at Work Julien Codorniou, stated that there are around 300 businesses using Facebook at Work. They include drink company Heineken whose US employees is trialling the platform and Century 21 whose 4,000 employees is using Facebook at Work.

The Royal Bank of Scotland will be the world's first bank company  to adopt Facebook at Work. It is also the largest company that use this service for its employees.

The RBS will use the platform for business collaboration and communication. Facebook at Work will allow the workers to create groups, post photos and events, send private messages to their colleagues and even offer banking services to the public.

The Chief of Administrative Officer at RBS Simon McNamara said, as reported on CNBC, that Facebook At Work can help the company's employees to do their job better by bringing people together from across the bank. He added that the platform also makes the employees find answers to customer queries faster.

Facebook At Work offers free services for now, but the company later plans to charge for extra features such as integrations with other enterprise software for example Microsoft Office 365.

With Facebook At Work, the world's largest social network has positioned itself to compete with other social networks that are designed for the enterprise. The company is going to be in competition with Microsoft with its Office suite and Yammer,

Google with its Google for Work, an enterprise messaging startup Slack, as well as LikedIn's network of professionals.

The global spending for developing the platform is estimated to be $338.7 billion in this year. With more than 1.5 billion people already using Facebook social network, the company is confident to win the enterprise market.