A workplace revolution is coming to financial services
Our Workplace 2025 report highlighted five trends that will change the way we work over the next few years:
- New technology like artificial intelligence will generate an intelligent workplace
- Demographic change will create a cross-generational workplace
- Social attitudes will create a lifestyle workplace
- Crowdsourcing and co-creation will produce a boundary-less workplace
- The threat of climate change will result in a low-impact workplace
These developments will be seen across all sectors. But they will have a specific impact on the financial services world.
A few weeks ago I joined PAC’s principal analyst Andreas Stiehler for a webinar to talk about the way the 2025 trends will influence our sector.
We discussed the key issues faced by financial services organizations and offered some suggestions for how they should be tackled.
A perfect storm of change
The financial services marketplace is facing a perfect storm of factors that will require drastic change to how and where we work.
Digital disruption is one such factor. Thanks to an influx of new digital-first firms, traditional banks and insurers are having to rethink the way they do business and work with their customers.
The old days of acquisitions and growing your franchise are on the way out. Instead, financial services firms are increasingly focusing on new digital ways of working that can help them compete in the coming years.
But while this revolution is largely driven by technology, financial services firms must not ignore the changing nature of the workforce, particularly as more millennials enter the workforce with their own perspective on what’s important: a stronger focus on environmental or ethical issues than their baby boomer parents, for example.
Many banks and insurers are recruiting more specialist to help them transform in line with these new technological and demographical demands. National Australia Bank expects to recruit 2,000 new employees within artificial intelligence and robotics, for example.
Are banks and insurers ready to adapt?
When we interviewed 1,000 CXO-level decision-makers last year to create our Workplace 2025 report, 25% of them came from the financial services sector. This gave us a fantastic opportunity to compare it with other industries.
83% of financial services executives told us high workforce attrition rates are a challenge to productivity, for example – above the 81% average across all industries.
Similarly, 83% of those in the financial services sector suggested a lack of access to the right technology is a barrier to workplace productivity, vs. 79% across all industries. And 69% said their current cyber security approach has a negative impact on productivity, vs. 56% across all industries.
In fact, financial services decision-makers are generally more concerned about cyber security issues that their counterparts in other sectors.
Given reported cyber attacks against financial services firms rose 80% in the last year, this latter finding is not entirely surprising. But these numbers generally suggest the sector has fallen behind when it comes to workplace technology and the surrounding processes, putting traditional firms at real risk of disruption if they don’t make the right investments soon.
What happens next?
I’ve talked about the problems financial services firms are facing today, as highlighted by our Workplace 2025 report.
But if you’re a financial services decision-maker reading this, how do you actually go about making the necessary changes to overcome these challenges and thrive in future?
Our webinar contains everything you need to know, providing you with practical steps to transform your workplace and future-proof your organization.
Watch the webinar now to learn more
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