Eleni Kelly, Pluxee CIO

When Eleni Kelly joined Pluxee UK, the organization was four years behind on a digital transformation, struggling with tech debt and not meeting customer expectations. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) realized this and set in motion a new way of working, technology consolidation, and a new platform for customers.

Sodexo spun out and listed Pluxee as a separate business in February 2024, having adopted the new name in 2023. Previously, it was known as Sodexo Benefits and Rewards. Typical Pluxee customers are Human Resources (HR) directors. Kelly says of Pluxee, which she joined the UK arm of in the summer of 2023:

It is one of the leading employee engagement organizations, operating in 31 countries and touching 36 million people.

Kelly joined to redefine the digital strategy, and then divestment took place four months into her new appointment, of which she says:

It added a little more spice. But I have a background in mergers and acquisitions, so I took it in my stride.

Kelly found that the digital transformation was not achieving its target because Pluxee had over 100 platforms, as a result of its own background of mergers and acquisitions. She adds:

For an organization of this size, that is not ideal. They were all disjointed. We had eight different products, each with their own look and feel, so it was a disjointed user experience.

Inevitably, this diversity of platforms led to a significant cost being added to any changes to the technology or service. As a result, the operating expenditure was too high, the CIO says. She realized the direction of her role was now:

To recover the lost years of the previous transformation, consolidate my platforms and bring in a vehicle for transformation. That is easier said than done, as there were a number of different operating models. It was really a great challenge.

Tech debt had built up, with some platforms being over 15 years old, she adds:

They were creaking; you couldn’t just keep spot fixing. But it wasn’t just a case of upgrading the technology, as that would not solve the problem we had around transformation and meeting the expectations of the business.

Kelly needed to change the technology that delivered the digital Pluxee services, which had been promised years in advance, and move to a new way of working across all areas of the organization. If Pluxee were to deliver its services digitally, then it had to start working in digital ways.

Reset

Pluxee UK had started a digital transformation in 2019, which Kelly describes as being very ambitious and an amazing vision, but the business didn’t have the technology to deliver on that vision. It had tried outsourcing to offshore providers, but four years later, it hadn’t been able to deliver the results the business expected, leading to growing frustration. She says:

We had to call it and say we cannot keep going on like this. It is a failed approach, and we need a new approach. It was clear to me we couldn’t just try something different in terms of technology; it had to be a holistic change.

Aware of the need to rationalize the technology estate, Kelly took the decision to move the development of the customer-facing applications to a single instance of a low-code application development platform. She says:

We are not just refactoring, we have redesigned so that there is a consistent user experience and to be sure that we are fit for the future.

Kelly chose to partner with OutSystems, and at the time of our interview explained that by 2027, following the completion of Pluxee’s migration, 95% of the applications customers use will be delivered on low-code technology. She adds:

We didn’t have the luxury of getting it wrong again as there was still a lot of baggage from previous projects.

Alongside this, Kelly made sure legacy technologies were decommissioned. A soft launch of the new services took place in April 2025, following a development time of just seven months, and Kelly says she has a three-year roadmap to move Pluxee away from its legacy platforms. The seven-month transformation benefited from a wealth of good customer insight at Pluxee.

As the CIO has said, the change had to be in more than the technology used. Teams had joined Pluxee through mergers and acquisitions, and some teams had been in place for 25 years. To be a digital business, Kelly knew they had to learn how to work in the fast-paced ways that digital business demands, she says:

So our mindset had to change, and we had to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. We put a lot of effort into that as well as the values and what it means, while retaining the essence of why our customers stay with us, which is due to great customer service.

Kelly made sure that the entire UK organization was involved in the digital transformation, which again was how they would succeed. She adds:

We had everybody in the business involved; it wasn’t an Information Technology (IT) project. There was nothing being developed that was out of reach. I believe in transparency. At the standups, I wanted the business lines to critique it, challenge us, and ask why we are doing things a certain way. We wanted that conversation.

She says the culture of Pluxee helped:

It was about who we are as a business, and what we are trying to achieve, that enabled them to act as a critical friend and sense check everything that we did. Making sure that we are part of one team.

When you don’t share the context, it’s very difficult to build trust. If you are not open, then you don’t get the right decision.

That then enables decisions to be made by those most impacted, who may not be in IT, she adds:

IT shouldn’t be prioritizing. We need to collectively make decisions; it may take a little longer, but ultimately, we will get faster as we are working as one team.

Before the transformation began, Kelly and her peers defined the key performance indicators (KPIs). Adoption of the new applications and onboarding of new customers were defined as two of the most important KPIs, with the latter dropping to hours thanks to self-service elements that the Pluxee UK developers have been able to deploy. She reports 90% adoption of the new Pluxee app.

Public values

Kelly is one of a small but growing number of CIOs who have transitioned from the private sector into the public sector and then back into the private sector. She says of this career journey:

“Pluxee is a commercial organization, but some of the values are like the public sector, and what I learned from the public sector is complex stakeholder management. Especially being able to articulate the value of technology to a minister, as they understand policy and politics, but we had to get them to care about IT security, for example.

Pluxee has a similar level of complexity; customers are both the HR directors and their employees. Before joining Pluxee, Kelly led technology at the Home Office for a year and had been at the Crown Commercial Service between 2019 and 2021. Prior to her public sector career, she had held technology leadership roles at oil firm BP, financial service businesses Close Brothers and Refinitiv, and has also worked for Oracle, Yahoo, Xerox, GE Capital, and Dell.

My take

Technology consolidation is an essential but difficult task. Kelly seized the opportunity to consolidate the estate at Pluxee and help the UK operation modernize its services and meet the needs of its customers.