Rising potential of tech talent in the financial services industry
The best tech talent is known to go for the tech giants such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. With technology becoming a business necessity, the demand for them is quite high across all sectors. The financial sector is not an exception. In the past, this sector relied on the Banking and Financial Services applications vendors, but the scenario is changing.
The Current Scenario
Now, with the rise of fintech, the two worlds are converging pretty rapidly. Technology has given way to a range of new financial services. The services range from widely adopted online banking, online customer service, and smart analytics to newly introduced challenger banks. The sector experienced unprecedented growth of these challenger banks, disrupting the traditional financial institutions in a not so subtle manner. To adjust to impending technology-driven changes in the industry, adopting new technologies is, therefore, essential for the financial services companies. They have to be on the lookout for new tech advancement to meet the customer expectation of certain tech-driven experience. Financial service companies need the best talent in this field to successfully adapt and become digital-first organizations with fintech abilities.
To achieve this, there are now positions to be filled by tech workers in these companies. An American banker article points out:
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein calls the investment bank a tech company — and roughly 25% of its 33,000 employees are engineers. JPMorgan reportedly employs 50,000 technology workers (including a former Google artificial intelligence executive), which is nearly double the total number of employees at Facebook.
The Road Ahead
With Application programming interfaces (APIs) unbundling the financial services, companies can now easily approach innovation. APIs allow consumers and SMEs to authorize third parties to access their account information efficiently. And these APIs can be combined with several others to create truly innovative experiences for consumers and create new apps and services. For instance, when Google Maps opened its API to developers, it resulted in a bunch of new applications. Startups such as Uber, which is now valued in billions, were made possible. This is the future for the financial sector, which will allow techies to build innovative solutions and make an impact.
It is time for the best tech talents to join the financial services sector and help shape the future. A growing number of tech workers are joining this industry every year. Here are the top five reasons why so many of them are choosing the financial services industry:
Job Satisfaction
A survey by HackerRank asked 40,000 programmers what they look for in a job. 43% of them put their desire to solve interesting problems at the top of the list. And there is no dearth of interesting problems to solve in financial services that also have a big impact on people’s lives. The broad scope of work offered by the financial services industry has been a key motivation for tech workers to join it. They work on a huge volume of data, mobile application development, web security, data mining, high-performance work systems, Blockchain, and machine learning to even robotics. With technology and business strategies entwining, the scope is expected to become broader.
Infact, financial services sector is known to be an early adopter of technology and lot of savvy financial services companies are looking to develop such technology in house.
High Compensation
Companies are always on the hunt for new tech talents. However, they are not only competing within their industry to attract the best ones but also with the other industries. Tech workers are always in demand, and numerous options from different sectors are available to them. Financial services companies are often their choice for putting forward the best offers in terms of salary and benefits.
Huge Market
The financial sector's growth is now driven by better financial access and services through technology and the huge underserved customer segments around the world. High demand in this sector led to the explosive growth of the global Banking and Financial Services applications market. In 2019, the market was worth USD 103.99 billion, and by 2025, it is expected to reach USD 164.01 billion, at a compound annual growth rate of 7.89% over the forecast period 2020 – 2025.
Impacts Everyone Directly
Tech talent is usually paid well in various industries but they also look for the impact that their work can create. Financial services touch each one of us directly. Payments, Loans, Insurance, Investments and many such areas impact us all and, in several situations, can transform lives. A techie working in the financial services industry meets people who use their software and know they made a difference. Just take a look at your phone – chances are you have an app from your bank which gives access to your account information at the touch/click of a button, day or night. This sort of gratification wasn’t available just a few years ago. Technology made that possible. And not just that, quick and easy digital lending technologies have now made money available to people in need.
The financial services industry values and generously rewards tech talent. With countless opportunities to thrive, the financial services industry is the next destination for top tech talent.