One of our studios is on the island of Guernsey.
If you work in the financial services sector, you probably know that Guernsey bills itself as ‘a leading global finance centre’.
Out of interest, I decided to take a look at how many vacancies there are in finance roles on the island.
Keeping in mind the island population is around 65,000, we’re dealing with something of a microcosm here.
My method isn’t scientific, I picked a local recruiter’s website, selected the various finance categories and counted how many roles they are advertising right now.
Here’s what I found:
- Accountancy, audit and tax - 50 roles
- Banking - 13 roles
- Fund management - 40 roles
- Insurance - 8 roles
- Pensions - 5 roles
- Trust admin - 50 roles
That’s a whopping total of 166 current roles.
For a small island, that’s a lot of companies looking for a lot of people.
It reflects the conversations I’ve been having with people in the industry. Finding skilled professionals is hard and it’s becoming harder.
The feeling is that there is a shortage of people.
The impact of this is obvious:
- Company capacity is reduced
- Service levels (potentially) drop
- It’s harder to earn revenue
Digital transformation or digital salvation?
High on the finance industry agenda is digital transformation.
Most would probably say that digital transformation is something to pursue in order to modernise processes and make for a better customer experience.
The truth, however, is probably more along the lines of plugging the people gap.
We recently completed the production of a vast piece of financial reporting automation software.
Financial reporting is a part of a firm’s regulatory compliance activities, a necessary evil some might say.
The nuts and bolts of filing regulatory reports is usually a very long questionnaire, data gathering and coordinating of information.
It’s a people-heavy process.
When our client asked us to automate the process, there was lots of talk of the technology, of the methods we’d use, testing and building, but ultimately, the brief could have been summarised like this:
How can we get more of this done with fewer people?
That, I believe, is the key question, whether or not they acknowledge it, that most financial services organisations are facing.
More with less
I think there’s something of a fear or distrust of technology when it comes to delivering work that was previously done by real people.
I regularly see people proposing supermarket boycotts because of the introduction of increasing numbers of self-scan machines.
They see it as a threat to jobs and I’m sure in some cases, their fears are justified.
We must as an industry, however, face up to the fact that right now, there are fewer people than is required to meet the demand of clients.
Add to that an always-evolving regulatory landscape, and it’s no wonder firms are searching for people in such great volumes.
I think it’s time we stopped thinking of digital transformation as something we’re doing to modernise an ageing business and start seeing it for what it is, salvation.
Technology is becoming the only way operators in the industry can continue to serve the market.
