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Some of the challenges involved in managing a financial institution’s technology team echo those found everywhere, from dealing with underperforming employees to boosting morale.
Others are more technologically prominent or unique to the industry.
Technology executives and leaders at banks and credit unions are finding their teams are hungry for change and want to know their creations will have an impact. But they must also demonstrate the business case for the new technology and not be fooled by hot emerging technologies such as these.
Addressing these issues is important because “banks’ technology is a core part of their business,” said Bridie Fanning, Accenture’s North America banking talent and organization leader.
Some challenges start at the top.
“Information technology is often viewed as a cost of doing business,” said Carey Ransom, managing director of BankTech Ventures, a venture capital fund with banks as limited partners. “People with a business education were taught to minimize costs” rather than invest in things that would spur new forms of revenue or growth.
Passion project or smart decision?
Several executives emphasized that technical teams particularly value seeing the impact of their work, and projects that go nowhere can demoralize. It’s important to make sure you have a viable business case, even if it means an exciting venture is axed before it even gets off the ground.
At the same time, employees also want to devote themselves to projects they love.
In the past ten years,
“It also improves employee morale and productivity,” Muthukrishnan said. “You’re not just maintaining someone’s code, you’re building something new and solving customer problems.”
Oscar Gonzalez, principal of financial solutions embedded banking at Citizens Financial Group in Providence, R.I., is not part of the $222 billion-asset Citizens Financial Group Group (Citizens Financial Group) but works regularly with these teams. He observed a similar phenomenon, as well as a strong desire among technical employees to take ownership of products.
“I’ve found that people are more productive when they do something they are good at and enjoy,” he said. “People in the information technology field especially like change.”
To keep Ally’s technical staff feeling energized, senior management pushes for transfers or promotions. Muthukrishnan said that the internal liquidity of this part of the company has increased from 7% when he joined in 2020 to 28% currently; personnel in machine learning modeling, risk management, compliance, cybersecurity, application development and other fields They all switched roles. For example, the head of technology risk recently switched places with the head of technology operations. Every quarter, Muthukrishnan and other leaders discuss new opportunities that may be available to many of the $186 billion bank’s 2,300 technology employees.
“When people across the organization see it, it sparks ideas,” Muttukrishan said.
Another part of your retention strategy is giving back. Specifically, on the technology side, Ally employees will help refurbish laptops and other equipment donated to nonprofits in Detroit and Charlotte, N.C., and work with nonprofits and local governments, including the City of Detroit, to teach the network road safety, coding and other skills. They also contributed the bank’s personally identifiable information masking code to the open source community of LangChain, a platform for developers to build AI-powered applications.
Muthukrishan noted that employee turnover is currently in single digits, down from double digits a few years ago.
“Our business philosophy is that we want every other company in the world to chase Allied talent, but no one wants to leave,” Muthukrishnan said.
TD Bank Group, headquartered in Toronto, Canada, has assets of US$1.4 trillion and has a mechanism called TD Invent to turn employees’ ideas into real-life projects.
“There needs to be a balance between driving good business results and doing meaningful, interesting work,” said Imran Khan, head of TD Invent. “If you are too disconnected from the business, your work will be successful. The chances are lowered. If you don’t think far enough into the future, your work may not be as impactful.”
For example, his team believes Metaverse has yet to have a real impact on customers.But they did see the potential
Another difficult balance to strike in tech is the balance between burnout and boredom.
“For digital teams that are doing member-driven activities and have to constantly meet consumer demand, they’re going to get buried,” he said.
But subject matter experts on traditional banking platforms, such as those used for cold storage or item handling, may see these systems maturing to the point where they won’t change much.
“You don’t want that guy walking out the door,” Ingram said. “Trying to keep them engaged so they don’t get bored is a real challenge.”
Fanning believes a similar phenomenon exists in banks. Those running legacy mainframe systems may get bored by focusing on one thing, but if they are approaching retirement age, they are often not interested in expanding their skills. New hires in cybersecurity or cloud roles may not be interested in learning legacy systems.
“One of the biggest challenges is retaining people on the mainframe and training new talent for mainframe systems,” she said.
Competition for cybersecurity and cloud expertise is particularly fierce, putting banks at a disadvantage if they don’t reward individuals accordingly.
“When a technician obtains cloud certification from Google, AWS or Microsoft, their market value immediately increases by 20%,” she said. “I don’t think a lot of banks realize that.”
What happened to the war for tech talent?
Despite the headlines about
“The abundance of job opportunities means that if I don’t like my employee experience today, I can easily move to another company,” Muttukrishnan said. “It’s easier if I’m telecommuting — I’m still sitting at the same desk and chair, it’s just that I’m working for a different company.”
Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bancorp is addressing this issue with short- and long-term plans.
The short-term question is: “How do we become an employer of choice in our industry?” said Brian Minick, the $215 billion bank’s chief technology and information security officer. Fifth Third’s technology team will frequently present keynotes and panels at industry conferences. Longer term, the bank is developing talent in its headquarters city by partnering with local high schools that have cyber clubs to host training sessions and hosting security challenges such as a computer-based game of “capture the flag” in which students must hack into each Stealing flags from other people’s computers in the school. The bank has developed a one-year leadership development program within the bank for high-potential employees in the information security field.
“The challenges we face
Discover Financial Services in Riverwoods, Ill., is also developing talent inside and outside the bank. Angel Diaz, vice president of technology capabilities and innovation at $152 billion Discover, said the Discover Technology Academy “is our internal community built by engineers for engineers.” In 2023, the company launched a public-facing Discover Technology Experience website for company developers to share their expertise.
These problems are particularly serious
“Realistically, there are only so many administrators who are familiar with the specific core banking system or application stack that a bank uses,” Ingram said. “It’s hard to find people who can communicate in both technical terms and layman’s terms, but also understand the business.”
At the same time, credit unions want people to live and work in the communities they serve. But “many people know their worth,” he continued. “They don’t want to move to Bellingham.”
In some cases, Ransom thinks community banks will hire separate chief information officers and chief technology officers. In his view, it is useful to have a CIO responsible for existing servers and networks, ATM and other physical systems, and infrastructure such as the cloud, and a CTO responsible for software development and integration, data strategy, and overall software and data. meaningful. architecture.
Finally, managing certain personalities or finding certain balances can be a challenge.
Kristiane Koontz, director of banking transformation at Zions Bancorp. in Salt Lake City, believes
Both types, she says, “can erode the culture and performance of the entire team.”
She can spot job hoppers based on their resumes. For people with highly specialized skills, sometimes one-on-one conversations can be effective by redefining their value as someone who can mentor the next generation of talent, she said. To reshape that mindset more broadly, Zions, an $87 billion company, is handing out quarterly awards in enterprise technology and operations. One category of this award is given to those who empower others.
“It takes time, but it’s part of the cultural shift,” Koontz said.
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