AI upskilling to employee engagement: Matthias Schacke spills UBS's 2024 growth plans
In 2023, UBS experienced significant transformations. On June 12th, UBS Group AG acquired Credit Suisse Group AG, assuming all assets and liabilities under Swiss law, thus becoming the direct or indirect shareholder of Credit Suisse Group AG's former subsidiaries. Subsequent to this acquisition, several key leadership appointments were made, including Todd Tuckner, Beatriz Martin Jimenez, Michelle Bereaux, and others.
As a global entity operating across 50+ countries, UBS successfully navigated challenging times. However, as we step into 2024, the company is poised to adopt fresh strategies and policies to address the evolving landscape of work. In an exclusive conversation, Matthias Schacke, Head of India Services and Technology, elaborated on the organisation's plans. He discussed strategies for enhancing employee skills, UBS's approach to offering flexibility in 2024, the integration of AI, and more.
Excerpts from the interview:
Q: In anticipation of the dynamic financial industry landscape, what investments is UBS making in the skills development of its employees to ensure they are well-prepared for the challenges of 2024?
The financial services landscape is rapidly evolving with emerging technologies, regulatory guidelines, heightened risk focus, stiff competition, and higher client expectations. Over the last few years, this has led to a critical need to continuously upskill and reskill employees to remain competitive in the market. Keeping in mind our workforce and the value they add to the firm’s success, we have focused on three key areas – digital, data and design thinking.
With technology playing the role of a differentiator, these skills are becoming foundational for almost all employees to deliver simple, innovative, and efficient solutions that improve client experience.
As a global firm with cross-regional teams and the rise of hybrid working, connecting the workforce to the firm’s culture and our way of doing things has also become an important developmental area. We have found including learning interventions centred around our pillars, principles, and behaviours have enabled our workforce to deliver better in areas like leadership, people and change management, diversity and inclusion, and risk management to name a few.
We’re also investing in specific areas like developmental programs for women, graduates, SME programs in technology, and building up our holistic learning platform that employees can access to develop various competencies.
Q: Given the ongoing changes in work dynamics, particularly with the continued impact of remote work, how is UBS adapting its approach to provide flexibility for employees in 2024?
Flexible working is not a new concept and has existed well before the pandemic. It just wasn’t as accepted and hence not implemented at a wide scale across the globe. The pandemic helped bust myths about productivity, tech adoption, and monitoring – proving that our talent, tools, and technologies are just as effective outside of formally recognised office spaces.
With the exception of individuals working in roles where there are regulatory requirements to work from office, at UBS we fully support flexible or hybrid working for all employees whose roles allow for it, typically offering flexibility of an average two to three days a week. We believe that hybrid working is an opportunity for us to retain the best talent while allowing individuals to balance their personal requirements while continuing to effectively contribute to the firm’s goals and their own professional ambitions.
However, we cannot forget that there are multiple benefits of having an employee eco-system that enables in-person collaboration, interaction, and learning. Being in office offers higher potential to ideate, innovate, and deliver excellence. It also plays a key role in truly understanding and living the firm’s culture. We have setup robust frameworks and tools that help us map attendance patterns, office space utilisation and what drives higher engagement when teams are in office.
As a global organisation with a presence in over 50 countries, we value the skills and perspectives that individuals from different parts of the world bring. It is not uncommon to find teams working across different time zones, cultures, and languages, collaborating on a project, deliverable or idea. We believe that hybrid working is a great opportunity to tap into the energies of a new global, diverse, and interconnected workforce.
Q: How is UBS planning to support the career growth and advancement of its employees in 2024?
The terms career growth and advancement have evolved over the past few years. From a very vertical and rank based approach, careers are steadily being viewed in terms of roles, opportunities to learn new skills, and the quality of contribution. That is not to say that seniority is not important, but it is no longer the sole criteria for career growth.
We’re continuously building our workforce to be the key talent hub for UBS globally and for this we’ve have identified opportunities that fuel growth of our talent in terms of role, exposure, and seniority. The key enablers for this are access to best-in-class education –internal and external, internal mobility opportunities to develop and hone transferrable skills, widen network, and learn new areas of business, and global movement of talent from India. In addition, we’re also consistently building a culture of ownership and accountability in our employees to take charge of their own careers.
Some of the key steps taken in this direction have been setting up an effective internal talent marketplace, promoting internal mobility successes, ensuring coaching and leadership pipeline building programs for high potential talent, and mentorship opportunities to name a few.
Overall, we believe offering ownership, education, mobility, and reward and recognition are important to support the career aspirations of our teams.
Q: How does UBS intend to foster adaptability and resilience among its employees in 2024 to navigate challenges effectively?
Fostering adaptability and resilience cannot be achieved by any single intervention. There are multiple touch-points that need to be carefully thought of to build a workforce that is resilient and works well in a constantly changing environment. As a firm, the need to constantly strengthen our employer value proposition and employee experience, transformative technology and the industry-wide pressure for efficiency are shaping our people priorities for 2024. At the top of our priorities are leadership development, effective people management, driving strong organisational culture, change management and improved employee engagement.
At UBS, the power of enabling change is shared with our employees. There’s a focus on taking ownership and driving programs that create change with accountability. In India, we’ve have identified four strategic areas – building talent, digital, innovation, and social impact – where employees are crafting solutions to enhance their own experience, roles, opportunities, and how they want to make a difference in our communities.
We are also continuing our efforts towards building an inclusive culture where every employee feels respected, accepted, supported, engaged, and valued, and bring their most authentic selves to work.
Q: Given the evolving nature of AI technologies, how is UBS investing in talent development to ensure that its workforce is equipped with the necessary skills to work effectively with AI?
Continuous innovation remains a priority for us to ensure that we remain competitive and relevant for our clients, and we have established a team that focuses on emerging technologies by researching, developing, and accelerating technical solutions across UBS. They partner with businesses and aligned functions to ensure we are focused on enabling right technologies - to solve for real business requirements and increasing value to our clients, employees, and shareholders.
For our people, we offer opportunities within the organisation to develop and grow by understanding both banking and technology. We organise tech conferences across 11 locations (including India) with over 15,000 people participating in the various events. Our global hackathon that just completed 10 years and had close to 1000 participants from India as part of cross-regional teams.
Alongside developing these solutions we’re mindful of preserving trust and being mindful of implications. So along with equipping our workforce with the skills for AI or other emerging technologies, we’re also focused on building awareness around developing artificial intelligence right with clear ethical and safety guidelines, in ways that benefit clients and employees.