Closing the Skills Gap With Financial Services Training and L&D
The banking and financial services industry has undergone a significant transformation, fueled by rapid technological advancements, stringent regulatory changes, and shifting customer expectations. Innovations like digital banking, AI, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and enhanced cybersecurity measures are revolutionizing how financial institutions operate and engage with clients. However, these advancements also highlight a growing skills gap, with many roles becoming obsolete. Research indicates that 1 in 6 financial services employees need reskilling to keep pace with industry demands. Reskilling and upskilling are critical for driving innovation, maintaining compliance, and meeting customer expectations, ultimately contributing to the broader economy and society.
To thrive in this evolving landscape, financial institutions must prioritize continuous learning and development to ensure their workforce remains agile, adaptable, and equipped to handle the challenges and opportunities of the future.
Challenges for Learning Leaders in Banking & Financial Companies
- Economic Uncertainty and Its Impact on Interest Rates: Economic uncertainty, such as fluctuating interest rates that affect loan affordability, investment returns, and overall financial stability presents significant challenges for the banking and financial industry. To navigate this volatility, L&D professionals must remain informed and adaptable, with a strong understanding of macroeconomic indicators and trends.
- Preparing for Risks Like Delinquency and Cybersecurity: With increasing digitalization, cyber threats and security breaches are a major concern for the banking and financial industry. While they invest in the latest technology-driven security measures for prevention, L&D must ensure that employees are aware of these threats to avoid breaches. Comprehensive training in cybersecurity protocols, risk assessment, and incident response is essential to safeguarding sensitive financial data and maintaining customer trust.
- Tight Job Market With Shrinking Talent Pools: As per a report by the Financial Services Skills Commission, almost a third of companies in the financial services sector are struggling to recruit owing to market skills shortages with thousands of critical roles, especially in data and technology, remaining vacant. L&D leaders should take steps to upskill and retrain employees in response to market demands as well as their own employees’ development needs.
- The Tapering Fintech Market and the Need to Innovate: The rise of Fintech/non-bank start-ups is altering the competitive landscape in banking and financial services companies, encouraging traditional institutions to reconsider how they conduct business. L&D programs must incorporate training in digital literacy, agile methodologies, and creative problem-solving, enabling staff to develop and implement innovative financial products and services.
- Human Vs Digital Customer Experience & Engagement: With the rising demands for virtual assistance, banks have adopted digital solutions to enhance customer experience. Yet, L&D leaders need to adapt training in customer relationship management, digital tools, and empathetic communication to ensure that staff provide a high-quality, unified customer experience.
- The Rise of AI, Mobile Banking, and the Metaverse: As the industry transforms with the adoption of blockchain technology and AI, L&D leaders must develop role-based technology learning roadmaps for the employees to learn and utilize technology for a competitive edge.
NIIT’s Specialized L&D Services for Banking & Financial Industry
The banking and financial industry faces numerous challenges such as interest rate cycles, rising inflation, cybersecurity, and a more competitive labor market. Now, more than ever, L&D leaders at these companies must work with agility to train their workforce for the unexpected responsibilities and duties. At NIIT, we’ve helped many banking and financial services companies align L&D with business priorities with our services, including
Efficient Learning Ecosystem for Banking Corporate Training: In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, banks must transform legacy systems across all areas including L&D. The workforce requires the optimization of learning portfolios, and a shift to technology-enabled learning experience platforms with hyper-personalized learning pathways. Reducing duplication and redundancy in third-party vendors while providing teams with access to the latest high-quality learning content and experience enhances both employee engagement and retention. Banks must transition away from traditional models to learning in the flow of work.
Revisiting Fixed Costs for Proprietary Training: The majority of banking’s learning portfolio is comprised of regulatory and compliance training and proprietary training. However, maintaining an army of trainers on the payroll for delivering proprietary, compliance, or regulatory training effectively isn’t necessary. NIIT’s unique rebadging value proposition for banks and financial services companies allows you to transition from fixed to variable costs, removing the burden of fixed trainer salaries. NIIT’s approach ensures that your team remains dedicated to you with payments based solely on the training you consume. They restructure jobs and cross-skill trainers to achieve economies of scale and reflect the business benefits to you.
Custom Content for Every Training Need: As working evolves into more fluid and hybrid models, your learning ecosystem must adapt to the changing realities of the workforce. NIIT provides tailored content to meet every learning need whether it’s training customer service teams to manage clients with empathy and inclusion or upskilling your tech talent. With the rising demands for product innovation and the modernization of legacy systems, learning leaders must revamp their learning portfolios with customized content in various modalities from experiential and immersive learning to microlearning for time-starved learners.
Case Study: Streamlining Compliance Training Program for Frontline Bankers
Challenge: Our customer representing America’s $23.7 trillion banking industry recognized the need to redesign the Frontline Compliance Training Program for all frontline bankers. Even though the existing compliance training program was comprehensive, the stakeholders decided to upgrade and streamline the program, focusing on personalizing learning to the learner’s role and aligning them with the current bank’s products and services. The main goal of the new program was to increase learner engagement, help learners practically apply compliance concepts in real-world situations, and reduce the training time.
Solution: Our customer partnered with NIIT to design a new Frontline Compliance Training Program, comprising 130 courses. The program utilized real-world scenarios and situations, requiring learners to make decisions based on scenarios they might encounter. This also offered flexibility for member banks to deploy the program on their own LMS or through our customer’s LMS for ongoing implementation and administrative and learner support.
Result: The new Frontline Compliance Program has been incredibly successful, with 1523 participating banks, over 250,000 users, and 3.7 million annual course completions. From its launch,
- 49 additional banks signed up for participation in the first three months.
- 25% of banks actively used the program.
- 700,000 course enrolments were received before the month’s end.
The new courses reduced 7.5 minutes per course, saving over 2 hours per learner annually, with industry savings exceeding $6 million per year.
Outsource Your Financial Services Training & Learning with NIIT
NIIT partners with banking and financial services companies to align talent strategies with business goals through a comprehensive "build, borrow, or buy" approach. With NIIT's managed training services, your organization can leverage customized programs that keep your workforce at the forefront of industry trends and technological advancements. Our solutions are designed to not only enhance employee skills but also to boost your organization's overall success and competitive edge. Discover how NIIT empowers the banking and financial sector to develop a resilient, future-ready workforce, equipped to meet tomorrow's challenges head-on.