This is an excerpt from Finextra’s report, 'The Future of Digital Banking in the UK 2022'.  

The “talent drought” has been a key topic of discussion from fintechs and banks alike. As companies become more in need of talent, especially those providing the building blocks for an increasingly digital banking world, it is the problem of these institutions to look at what they are doing to find, keep and benefit from top digital talent.

Looking for talent

Diversity in all sectors of finance continues to be a problem, leading to companies losing out on sections of talent. Tech Nations’ Diversity in UK Fintech 2021 report found that 20% of people in fintech are Black, Asian, and people of other underrepresented minorities. This is higher than the UK labour market where that figure is 11.8%. While Fintech Diversity Radar’s 2021 diversity report found that of the top 1,000 fintech globally only 16 were founded solely by women. The same report found that just 11.3% of fintech board members of women.

Lloyds emphasises their focus on diversity, stating they have a “diverse and equal opportunity approach to hiring as we know diverse teams drive much more creativity and innovation within an organisation.”

They further added: “a key metric for us is to increase the number of female and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic colleagues we have in senior roles, which is also built into our top talent recruitment processes.”

A spokesperson from Santander highlighted their ‘Young Leaders’ programme, which has an intake of 185 talented people from their geographies and a balanced gender representation. The aim of this programme is to “create a strong talent pool, teach skills needed for the future and promote diversity and inclusion. It’s a program that lasts 9 months and take place in the Young Leaders Smart City, a virtual, immersive space where they have the opportunity to come up against several challenges.”

Santander further pointed out their ‘BeTech! with Santander’ programme. This is a drive to attract more digital talent, but what employees’ “expectations of the workplace appear to be, such as search for meaning and development, focus on DE&I as a fair company and digital communities to share knowledge with experts, among others.”

One way companies see to increase the numbers of diverse people with experience is to look to other sectors, Lloyds commented on their experience in this area stating, “We therefore hire people from a wide range of backgrounds including strong technology and consumer-driven organisations, as well as financial services companies. We want to embrace new ideas and ways of working to enable us to continue to innovate and deliver even better solutions to our clients – some of our recent digital hires have worked in organisations such as Amazon Prime Video, Microsoft and BT.”

Meshkat shared this sentiment, commenting, “Working with passionate individuals from different disciplines is one of the greatest things we embrace.”

Company culture

The culture at play in a company can be a key way of retaining, attracting, and encouraging digital talent in their ideas.

Meshkat commented regarding their culture: “Happy teams create great products and make our customers happy. Our culture is what makes first direct different to other banks, and we value keeping our culture. […] We empower individuals to create positive changes for our customers and seeing the impact of these changes have the snowball effect to motivate teams to work towards excellence.”

Santander described their culture as largely being based around the consumer, stating, “in terms of culture, banks face tough competition for customers and talent. Technology firms continue to disrupt our industry, bringing new solutions and raising expectations. Customers now demand products that are fast, efficient, and personal. Furthermore, the role of business in society is changing. On many topics, from diversity to sustainability, we want to do more. The changes we face are big, so we have evolved our culture, building on our strengths. Our Purpose, Aim and Values remain the same, but we evolved our behaviours to propel us into a future of customer obsession.”

Santander noted that those “evolved” behaviours are “built around a single word: ‘T.E.A.M.S’. Each letter represents a behavior, making them simple and easy to remember: Think Customer, Embrace Change, Act Now, Move together, Speak UP.

However, Santander also emphasised some of their working practices to retain their digital talent. The bank commented that they “perceive that digital talent profiles are more demanding in terms of flexible and remote working opportunities and in our flexible work model we are offering the possibility for people to work in the hybrid model. We reinforce the role of the managers in the decisions regarding the model of work for their team based on data and insights regarding team performance and productivity but also the levels of employees’ engagements.”

Developing potential

Providing some element of training can be a key way to nurture talent in an organisation. This can be providing additional training to help existing workers with progression, it can be approaching university and education pools to gain talent early, and it can also be tapping into talent from other sectors which may benefit you in the long term.

Santander reported they filled 8,500 STEM vacancies after running brand awareness campaigns on social media and in forums.

In Lloyds’ view, “it isn’t easy to hire all the new skills you need so our approach is to work with our supplier partners to access key talent and skills as well to support us building our internal skills.”

Santander provided details of a number of programmes they run to encourage and attract tech talent. The first of these is their digital ecosystem Dojo, which they promote learning solutions such as study plans and ‘roadmaps’ for.

This programme appears to be aimed at existing professionals, as the company states, “Dojo facilitates informal, interactive and structured ways of learning, combining many formats, settings and tools so every employee can choose what, when, how and how much to learn. It's designed to produce “lifelong learners”. Furthermore, each subsidiary’s Learning and Development team pinpoints specific learning needs relating to its geography and designs training courses consistent with Dojo’s standards. It has four academies: Agile, Engineering Excellence, Cloud and Commercial. It also offers certifications, channels and learning programs covering topics such agile, data, leadership, cloud, and digital transformation.”

The second of these is their Global career strategy. For this they gave the example of Mundo Stander, which has been part of the strategy since 2008, and “supports the development of over 2,000 employees who have taken part in strategic assignments in other countries for short periods. It promotes the sharing of best practice and the broadening of participants’ global outlook and will continue as one of the offers, evolving in some aspects.”

Finally, Santander noted some of their educational programmes, stating they have partnerships with “more than 1,000 of the world’s leading universities and technical schools enabled us to introduce future professionals to our value proposition. They are a key source of the talented young people we find in our scholarship and internship programmes. We ran webinars, bootcamps, hackathons, training programmes and specialized talks by employees and senior managers at schools specializing in tech and digital learning.”