Bersin Company Research Reveals How Trailblazer Banks are Outperforming Their Peers in the New Digital Economy

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Dec 14, 2022, 10:14 ET

Latest Global Workforce Intelligence research by The Josh Bersin Company finds that high-performing banks have vastly different talent, skills and operating models than their counterparts
Trailblazer banks are leaving the rest standing as traditional players struggle to offer great digital experiences. Most banks' skills bases are falling behind, despite attempts to hire fresh talent, and the sector will be 350,000 people short of suitable digital and technology skills by 2025
The report unlocks the secret to digital transformation in this important part of the global economy. The banks that will be successful are proactively reskilling current employees with future-ready tech skills and retaining them by designing "irresistible" workplaces

OAKLAND, Calif., Dec. 14, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Josh Bersin Company, a research and advisory company focused on HR and workforce strategies, has today unveiled comprehensive new research revealing that today's highest-performing retail and commercial banks have completely different talent, skills and operating models from traditional banks.

A rapidly-widening talent gap is hampering traditional banks' ability to compete and stay relevant in a digital-first world. Unless they face this talent issue, long-standing players will never catch up with their modern counterparts, potentially losing relevance within 5-10 years. Those organizations identified as Trailblazers have a number of things to teach the rest of the market, the research reveals.

The new report, Consumer Banking Under Siege: Addressing the Digital Capability Gap, details these discoveries and unlocks the secret to successful digital transformation in this important sector.

Among its key findings:

The digital transformation of banks is not a technology problem, but a talent challenge
Most banks are struggling to offer the great digital experiences that clients now expect, but their skills base is failing to keep up, despite attempts to hire fresh talent
Trailblazer banks—those moving in the right strategic direction and seeing positive business results—are applying Talent Intelligence techniques to look laterally at opportunities to reskill employees out of roles that are becoming obsolete.
As a secondary strategy, these leading players are also proactively targeting suitable tech talent and designing "irresistible" workplaces to attract and keep them

The research is the latest output of a major ongoing Global Workforce Intelligence (GWI) research project, derived from deep analysis and synthesis of eightfold.ai's extensive talent intelligence platform and Bersin Company's global HR database.

The GWI Project has identified three types of talent challenges. Every industry faces them, but there is usually one predominant challenge type limiting their growth, which Trailblazer banks have creatively and successfully addressed. While the healthcare industry is working to overcome a gap in capacity (insufficient talent), for instance, the more pressing issue in banking is facing a capability challenge (internal talent possessing the wrong skills).

Consumer Banking Under Siege: Addressing the Digital Capability Gap includes detailed case studies of how Trailblazer banks are innovating and succeeding, including the experiences and shared best practices of:

BNY Mellon
ING
Rabobank
HSBC
Bank of America
Scotiabank
DBS.

Stella Ioannidou, Senior Research Manager, Financial Services Industry Lead at The Josh Bersin Company and author of the latest GWI Project study on Consumer Banking, said:

"Most consumer banks are currently trying to hire their way out of this talent challenge, but there aren't enough people with relevant tech skills to go round—particularly those who are also experienced in the banking industry. This year there's a 54,000 discrepancy in the talent available in the U.S.; if it persists that will grow into a 350,000 gap in future-ready technologists with banking experience.

"Even if banks look for tech talent without direct sector experience, they face fierce talent competition from consulting firms, IT service providers, Big Tech, and so on, so they need a different approach. They need to reskill the people they already have and make it a priority to keep employees close and engaged—and they need to do that now, as it will take time to build the capabilities and skills they so badly need."

Josh Bersin, global HR research analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, said:

"The Trailblazer banks we've identified have significantly more people in strategic technology roles and in transformation roles. For instance, they have 1.4 times more forward-looking tech skills than traditional banks for delivering better customer service, and for building better opportunities.

"The lessons for others are around having that vision for how they'll transform their organizations, figuring out what critical talent challenges they're going to face, analyzing the roles, skills and trends to understand what's going on, and then determining the best possible solution to get them where they want to be."

The new banking report is available from December 14, here. Its key findings will be discussed in a high-level video and will be available via an infographic.

The full, deep-dive content will be available exclusively to corporate Bersin Company corporate members, who also have an opportunity to be part of The Josh Bersin Company's Banking CHRO Council—an ongoing opportunity to share knowledge and experiences with peers across the sector, globally.

The GWI Project model presents a holistic solution to identified talent challenges in a given market. By leveraging an innovative Talent Intelligence approach and The Josh Bersin Company's strategic frameworks, each industry study identifies the predominant challenge that particular sector faces, highlights which strategic approaches and practices will best solve that problem in the short and long term, and provides a connection to seven principles or "secrets" employed by identified Trailblazers in that market.

Through this and upcoming research reports, Bersin Company provides the explicit direction and strategic approaches to business leaders that can help inspire and support the necessary organizational and team-level changes needed to drive future success in their industry.

About the Global Workforce Intelligence "Real Workforce" Data & Analytics Methodology

The Global Workforce Intelligence Project uses the world's largest database of workforce job role, skills, career pathways, and HR program maturity in the world. At its base is the eightfold.ai talent intelligence platform, a vast set of employee profiles, enriched by public social data and company public data, arranged in a time series format. Using eightfold's proprietary AI algorithms, all employees in a given set of companies can be looked at over a given set of time, and deep learning applied to infer the job skills, job clusters/families, levels, and career pathways across that period. The data can be further interrogated by company, location, organization size, and a wide variety of other factors to find relationships. Salary data is being added for future analysis.

This is then combined with The Josh Bersin Company database of HR practices and maturity by industry, coupled with C-level conversations with hundreds of executives, provides detailed insights into how companies in a given market sector are advanced or behind in addressing a whole series of HR challenges. This analysis can reveal that a given company's talent practices (using more than 320 individual sub-processes) are ahead or behind other companies in their industry group, and/or to identify major gaps in the workforce.

A final perspective is to compare and contrast trends and outcomes between sub-domains of an industry, or between vertical sectors, distilling what the most advanced (i.e.. most employee-efficient) employers look like vs. the laggards. In the coming months, wages and the role salaries in the workforce will be added to the analyses.

About The Josh Bersin Company

The Josh Bersin Company provides a wide range of research and advisory services, including a corporate membership program, to help HR leaders and professionals tackle the ever-evolving challenges and needs of today's workforce. The firm's research team covers all topics in HR, talent, and L&D, including diversity, equity, and inclusion; employee experience; remote and hybrid work; wellbeing; HR strategy and capabilities; learning and career mobility; HR technology; organization design and development; and talent acquisition and mobility. With the Global Workforce Intelligence (GWI) Project, The Josh Bersin Company also serves to expand its support of market-leading businesses by helping them navigate the challenges of industry convergence while remaining future-focused.

Under the company's umbrella is the Josh Bersin Academy, the world's first global development academy for HR and talent professionals and a transformation agent for HR organizations. The Academy, which has seen more than 50,000 program enrollments since its 2019 launch, offers content-rich online courses, a carefully curated library of tools and resources, and a global community that helps HR and talent professionals stay current on the trends and practices needed to drive organizational success in the modern world of work. Visit www.joshbersin.com or email [email protected].

About Eightfold AI

Eightfold AI's market-leading Talent Intelligence Platform™ helps organizations retain top performers, upskill and reskill their workforce, recruit talent efficiently, and reach diversity goals. Eightfold's patented deep learning artificial intelligence platform is available in more than 155 countries and 24 languages, enabling cutting-edge enterprises to transform their talent into a competitive advantage. For more information, visit www.eightfold.ai

SOURCE The Josh Bersin Company