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The banking industry in India has been rapidly evolving over the past few years, especially with the advent of initiatives like ‘Digital India’. Gone are the days when one had to walk up to a bank branch and meet a relationship manager to conduct day to day transactions.
Banking Today is Anytime, Anywhere
At the center of today’s banking ecosystem sits a tech savvy customer who wants on-demand, convenient services at the push of a button. To keep up with this customer, being mobile and social is a necessity for banks to thrive in today’s digital age. According to a recent report by NITI Aayog, the volume of digital transactions in 2016-17 touched 10.9 Billion registering a growth of about 55% over 2015-16. As people become more comfortable with mobile banking, banks are turning to social media platforms for not only customer interactions but also real time money transfers.
Digital banking is now creating heaps of “big data”, with which traditional banking infrastructure is struggling to cope. Banks are increasingly using big data tools and analytics to optimize operations, customer experience and risk analytics. On one end, emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Robotics are enabling banks to improve both front end and back end operations, and on the other banks are constantly reinventing themselves using blockchain technology. However, adoption and adjustment to this tech universe also leads to tech challenges around cybersecurity and data theft, a challenge that’s become very real in the last few years and a challenge that banks need to constantly work to address.
Are you Powering your Digital Transformation from the Core?
There are many steps involved in making an organisation truly digital. The equipment – both hardware and software – needs to be upgraded, processes and workflows need to be defined, and a whole new information architecture needs to be implemented. But what really lies at the core of this digitization are the people who form that organisation and the culture that defines them. Just as a tech savvy customer sits at the core of the banking ecosystem, a tech savvy employee sits at the core of the transformation banks are seeking to undergo. With the banking industry evolving at such an unprecedented speed, there is an increasing need to match skills of people with these technologies. According to the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC)’s estimates, the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sector in India will need an additional 1.6 million skilled workforce by 2022. Such a requirement needs manpower capacity building to be a topmost priority for Indian banks.
But what are the most in demand skills? We reviewed data from 28 million earners on Coursera and found that across industries, geographies and demographics, people are most interested in upskilling and reskilling in the field of computer science and data science. Below is a list of top five courses that Coursera learners employed in the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sector in India are currently pursuing:
- Machine Learning
- R Programming
- The Data Scientist’s Toolbox
- Customer Analytics
- Programming for Everybody (Getting started with Python)
The above is a representative list of skills of the future and it’s time for banks to train their employees to prepare them for jobs of the future.
How do you Build the Digital Banker of Tomorrow?
The banker of tomorrow will need to acquire skills and adapt to roles unheard to the banker of today. Digital transformation for banks will mean transformation of not only its inherent technology but also of its people. There will be a constant need to support continuous learning, whether the focus is short-term skill acquisition for entry-level staff or domain mastery for management and executives.
In order to truly keep up with the pace of technology and to gain an edge over competitors, banks need to adopt a four fold approach:
- Move with technology: Banks need to fully embrace the path where emerging technology is taking them. In order to do so, the workforce needs to evolve on a continuous basis by constantly reskilling and upskilling. Equip the banker of today to handle the banking requirements of tomorrow.
- Put employees first: In today’s business environment, banks need to extend their customer centric approach to make it employee centric. It is imperative for the success of any organisation to be able to attract and retain the top talent in the industry. Encourage stickiness by investing in the long term development of your workforce.
- Embrace the new generation of bankers: The workforce and the workplace look very different today than they did a decade ago. By 2025, more than 40% of the population in India will be millenials. A millennial banker will have very different aspirations and expectations than the banker of today. An average millennial needs more room to grow and thrive in an organisation –something banks need to embrace.
- Encourage innovation: Build a culture in your organisations that allows your workforce to be agile, collaborative and diverse. Rethink your L&D policies to ensure that every individual and every combination of individuals in your organisation is able to think out of the box.
Building a culture of lifelong learning is the only long term, sustainable method of building the banker of tomorrow.
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