HOW TO (RE)BUILD A BANK: REMOTE WORKING
Sunset on the office on the Sunset
As home working becomes a permanent arrangement for many, AutoRek’s Nick Botha, Tony Warren from Lloyds Banking Group and Robert Swales at Nationwide consider how regulated industries will build around it One in four of the UK’s one million financial services employees wants to work from home full-time, while 69 per cent don’t want to spend more than two days a week in the office.
The figures, revealed in a survey this summer from Accenture, suggest that, despite Zoom fatigue, and pets, partners and kids doing their best to distract them, staff won’t be rushing back to their old desks any time soon. Is that a problem? Quite the opposite, say the researchers. In an earlier study – during the last lockdown in February – they suggested that a remote or hybrid workplace policy would a) save firms a fortune, b) improve productivity and retention and c) give the industry access to a borderless talent pool. Many employers that had gone through the pain of rapidly transitioning the majority of staff to home working during the pandemic had already, in fact, come to broadly the same conclusions.
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By March this year, Nationwide had told 13,000 staff they could choose to work interchangeably from home, their local branch or the bank’s HQ. Its own internal survey suggested more than half would opt for the first, permanently. Lloyds Banking Group is currently also working on a pick’n’mix approach; a strategy that will allow staff to choose between home/hub/hybrid locations, which could see the organisation slash office space by 20 per cent over three years, according to management. The freedom to ‘locate for your day’ speaks to a progressive new era in industrial relations, but it’s far from simple to achieve in a heavily-regulated environment like financial services. Under pressure to relentlessly raise the bar on cybersecurity, while coming up with new and improved products and services, institutions were forced during the pandemic to rely more on third-party providers as they coped with this new way of working.
“No matter how defined the rules and regulations are, or how robust you think your internal systems are, there’s always the next thing lurking around the corner,” observes Nick Botha, business development manager for Scottish regtech AutoRek. The fatality of that argument was proved in March 2020, since when, says Botha, there’s been something of a sea-change in financial institutions’ attitudes towards partnering with companies like his own. The change has been for the better, he says, allowing banks to focus on their key activities, while their technology partners can focus on what they do best. “Financial institutions need to shift their mindset, from controlling everything in their boundaries to really partnering with the right organisations,” says Botha. Regulatory and financial controls are where AutoRek is focussed – and that's very much middle-and back office territory, where banks have been guilty of building high walls around their IT www.fintechf.com
