Industry
Banking
Banking on purpose-led ecosystems
Highlights
- Firms are facing challenges in finding and retaining talent for core platforms in the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) industry.
- The talent factory model envisages an overall framework covering aspects such as recruitment, onboarding, and technology and domain training.
- BFSI firms should adopt a factory approach to building and developing talent to meet business needs while mitigating the risks of attrition and scarcity of human resources.
Introduction
In today’s challenging talent market, finding, developing, and retaining experienced resources can be difficult.
This is especially true for core platforms in the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) industry, which require both technical and domain experience. BFSI systems such as core banking, payments, claims processing, trading, and asset management require specialized teams. Finding and retaining talent with such specialized skills needed to run business critical systems pose challenges for BFSI firms.
We believe that BFSI firms should consider embracing a factory approach to building and developing talent to meet business needs while mitigating the risks of attrition and scarcity of human resources. A talent factory model envisages an overall framework covering aspects such as recruitment, onboarding, and technology and domain training, among others. Embracing such a model can help BFSI firms form teams at scale, with an enabling ecosystem to develop and maintain talent.
Key to recruitment
The talent factory model envisions dedicated teams for recruitment, onboarding, and training.
While recruitment teams can help banks and insurers obtain the right talent, an onboarding team will be responsible for ensuring smooth onboarding without administrative delays and glitches. Yet another team will focus on equipping new resources with niche skills in specific areas of banking and insurance.
In our experience, many global banks face challenges in finding the right talent to manage their payment systems. These systems vary greatly, given that banks offer a variety of payment methods such as credit and debit cards, app-based payments (Apple Pay, Google Pay), and real-time digital payments. The rise of new age embedded payment options such as account-to-account, request-to-pay, QR codes, and so on has further complicated this space.
Even if banks do find talent with niche skills in payments, the recruitment, onboarding, and training processes are often disruptive, compromising the quality of experience delivered to new employees. BFSI firms are seeking ways to overcome administrative hitches and streamline the talent acquisition process. In such an environment, adopting a factory approach will not only help BFSI firms build a smarter workforce equipped with the requisite skills but also ensure hassle-free recruitment at scale.
Training resources in technology and enabling them to gain knowledge in niche areas of the banking and insurance domains is another area full of pitfalls. For instance, finding resources with the right artificial intelligence (AI) skills needed for speedy insurance claims processing or quickly resolving credit card disputes is a tall task. The talent factory approach offers a solution for this—setting up an academy focused on both tracks, with the flexibility to cater to the needs of individual resources.
What next
Once new resources are part of the bank or insurance firm, a new question arises: how to motivate and retain talent?
This is significant as the cost of recruiting and training a new resource is far higher than retaining an old one. This is especially true given the need for specialized technology skills and domain expertise in areas such as payments and claims processing. The answer lies in defining a structured career path focused on growth to motivate resources. However, even with the best career path in place, attrition is inevitable. To address this, the talent factory model envisions exit plans to identify replacements and mitigate attrition risks, which could otherwise be quite damaging for a firm. For example, if a health insurance company experiences heavy attrition during annual enrollment and is understaffed, it will not be able to manage the high demand and face huge losses, both in terms of reputation and new customer acquisition.
Case in point
A leading global insurance provider was facing challenges such as high attrition and slow execution due to their vendors’ inability to supply the right talent.
We partnered with the firm in 2022 to ramp up the workforce and built teams with skills across various functions such as insurance brokerage, sales, case management, claims processing, and compensation.
The transformation required mobilizing talent at scale (over 4,000 team members) throughout the enterprise. We adopted the talent factory approach and successfully completed the effort within eight months, providing the resources to support about 2,000 applications. Key benefits to the customer included a stable and competent workforce that logged over 163, 000 learning hours and received 97% positive playback session feedback and around 45, 000 person hours saved annually from process improvements.
With its ability to deliver niche BFSI talent at scale, ensure employee satisfaction and retention, and build a smart workforce with the capacity to meet evolving business demands, the talent factory model offers financial services firms a proven way to address their talent woes. In our view, BFSI firms must consider this model to overcome their talent-related challenges.
