TD Bank Group runs a shared virtual-reality environment for its early talent cohorts — interns, co-op students and first-year analysts — as an alternative to video-conferencing for the social and developmental parts of their placements. Participants are mailed VR headsets, build personalised avatars and meet inside custom TD spaces rather than joining a call.
The spaces are deliberately fantastical rather than replicas of TD offices: the internal hub includes boardrooms looking out over the coast of Montenegro and the rice fields of Vietnam. Programming spans networking sessions and scavenger hunts, team-building activities including dodgeball, bowling and an escape room, live leadership panel discussions with senior executives, a lunch-and-learn on the future of money, and a 60-day innovation challenge in which groups work on a real TD problem with a mentor, using in-headset collaboration and whiteboarding tools to build prototypes.
The idea came from an internal iD8 Tech Jam ideation challenge, where teams pitched engaging retail banking customers in VR. Vlora Muslimi, Senior Manager, Ideation and Colleague Innovation, redirected the concept at students rather than customers on the grounds that they are digital natives, secured innovation-council funding in July 2022, and built the programme with the Early Talent Experience team.
The Canadian pilot ran from January to April 2023 with more than 100 interns, drawn primarily from the Platforms and Technology and Digital & Innovation teams, and was delivered with the consultancy Capco and the enterprise VR company Mesmerise. TD reported that 93% of intern participants polled said they would recommend the experience to friends or classmates, and that engagement was higher than on video-calling platforms — with students meeting up in the TD spaces outside scheduled events.
TD expanded the programme in 2024 working with Remio, a VR platform for remote team building and collaboration. A further 80 co-op and intern students took part in Canada between February and April 2024, and a US pilot over the same window involved 26 analysts with less than a year of service. Meta led a session with participants on VR's potential in a business setting. By May 2024, 284 co-op students and interns had completed the programme in VR.
The vendor stack therefore changed between phases: Capco and Mesmerise built the 2023 Canadian pilot, and Remio delivered the 2024 expansion. No source names the headset hardware used in either phase.
