Blogs > Banks must bridge the talent gap with digital technology
14 July –

Banks must bridge the talent gap with digital technology

Financial institutions can struggle to attract exciting new talent, but reversing the brain drain starts with exciting new platforms

Alexander Hamilton
3 min

Attracting talent is one of the most challenging tasks for banks and financial institutions in the market today. 62% of banking leaders believe the talent gap has widened in recent years, more than any other industry.

Nowhere is this more keenly felt than in the race against the big technology companies of the day. Banks previously counted on high salaries and enticing perks to draw new employees into their ranks. 

This strategy has become less and less effective while the fintech talent acquisition grows. The global fintech sector employs 300,000 people, more than the population of European tech cities Zurich and Frankfurt combined.

Younger generations are less driven by their wages and benefits packages. 21% of millennials and Generation Z say “making a positive contribution” to their firm is a top priority. Also of major importance is that 80% of new roles in the sector have a focus on technology.

As financial institutions undergo their own digital transformations, they must work to attract employees with the skills and knowledge necessary to apply new technologies. They need a workforce able to adapt.

What fintech talent wants

Three-quarters of financial institutions are creating new IT roles. Despite that, half say hiring is “difficult” or “very difficult”. So what does this new generation of engineers and developers want?

Young engineers want to work with systems that connect them to new digital ecosystems. They want to handle large amounts of data and don’t want to spend their time carrying out unproductive manual tasks.

Graduates also want to see the impact their work is making being translated into the real world. They want to see the code they have written solving issues in the market in a rapid timeframe. They want scrums, agile teams, and releases that occur in a matter of weeks, rather than months.

When you have a young workforce empowered with these incentives they are guaranteed to provide an extra kick in helping clients create products, implement hyper-personalisation, or build innovative solutions. These are also the conditions in which young talent aims to join and thrive in.

Digital transformation for the workforce

Using the same legacy system naturally means needing the same people to keep things running. This creates a vicious cycle where the knowledge of its inner workings concentrates in fewer and fewer hands. 

Suddenly, a bank relies on a small group of experts with core pieces of knowledge. While that risk can be managed on a day-to-day basis, crucial expertise can be lost with a handful of resignations or retirements.

Nowhere is this more impactful than the dearth of coders knowledgeable in COBOL. This coding language, though ageing, is deployed in billions of lines of legacy code. It runs plenty of mission-critical applications. A wave of retirements has created a brain drain.

With modern, open-source technology that eventuality is completely erased. Coding platforms created in Java, deploying using platforms like Kubernetes, and connecting services via APIs is a world away from legacy tech. The architecture forces transparency by its very nature, and through that transparency exciting new talent can be brought into the building.

Banks can reverse the brain drain problem by providing technology new hires will be excited to work for. Create exciting products which move the needle and put your firm on the map.

Want to learn more about what a next-generation platform can accomplish for your business? Download our in-depth whitepaper on the subject.

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