Optimize your bank’s workforce with a blueprint for growth and profitability
AUTHOR
The way people bank is changing —from the takeover of digital banking to the introduction of new products and offerings. As digitization accelerates, banking leaders need to make major changes to keep up with the competition and meet customer demand and rising expectations. This means delivering a workforce and talent strategy that aligns to your business strategy and desired plans for growth.
Over the next 10 years, McKinsey predicts there will be a seismic shift in the dynamics and composition of talent. For instance, technical capabilities within banks will expand, largely driven by the need for more developers writing applications and cybersecurity experts to bolster digital initiatives.
McKinsey predicts there will be a one-third reduction in branch workforce, as well as a 9x increase in the relative proportion of universal bankers required (those with both service and sales expertise and responsibilities).
The question is: how can you prepare for these impending workforce changes? How will you ensure you have the right people and the right channel mix (e.g., branches, online banking, chatbots, etc.) to best meet your customers’ needs and effectively manage costs?
The shift from reactive to intentional
Traditionally, hiring at most banks has been reactive with little planning beyond annual budget and headcount. It’s done in silos and tackled in bits and pieces by various stakeholders (e.g., commercial banking, retail banking, asset management, finance, operations, HR, etc.) by passing spreadsheets back and forth, working with stale data and taking a chance of sensitive data getting into the wrong hands.
A big impediment faced by leaders is lacking a single source of truth for visibility into workforce and costs across their organization and struggles to answer questions like, “How will demand for talent be impacted by automation and generative AI? What are the right roles and skills to invest in? Do my open requisitions align with the bank’s top priorities?” When these vital questions cannot be answered accurately, it leads to inefficiencies, redundant resources, higher costs, and ultimately, a poor customer experience. In the past, banks managed to circumvent this disconnect by hiring or contracting people on short notice. However, as concerns about cost creep grow and the labor market remains tight, banks have no choice but to reconsider their approach to workforce planning.
To stay ahead, forward-thinking banks are embracing the power of predictive insights and strategic workforce blueprinting solutions from software providers like Anaplan to tackle their workforce challenges head-on.
Strategic workforce blueprinting is a collaborative and integrated approach to workforce planning that ensures organization-wide alignment with your bank’s objectives to drive growth and profitability.
Banking’s next frontier: strategic workforce blueprinting
Instead of focusing only on the current jobs (or roles), a more integrated approach to workforce planning, or strategic workforce blueprinting as we call it, helps identify how skills needed for targeted jobs and roles will shift over time. It provides more accurate and granular headcount planning and forecasting, a centralized view of business lines, and advanced “what-if” scenario modeling to help you better respond to customer needs and market conditions.
By using a planning platform that supports strategic workforce blueprinting, you can achieve the following benefits:
- Drive sustainable growth. Align headcount and skills with top-line strategies to identify hiring, talent mobility and development (upskilling or reskilling), automation, and cost-effective alternatives like contractors and agencies. By ensuring you have the right people with the right skills to deliver on your strategic goals and priorities, you can minimize risk and accelerate revenue.
- Reduce costs and increase productivity. Maximize efficiency and transparency with a single view into talent demand and supply, redundancies, and skills and capabilities across multiple lines of business. Reallocate staff to where they are needed most to trim immediate costs up to 3% and use advanced “what-if” scenario modeling to drive better talent decisions that could generate an additional 2% savings over the long term.
- Improve customer satisfaction. Accurately forecast demand and labor capacity across your different channels. By simplifying the process of analyzing historical trends infused with market data to generate forecasts, you can optimize your staffing levels for improved NPS/CSAT to get ahead in a highly competitive market.
Chart your own path
Your future growth and profitability is dependent on your approach to workforce planning. Your task: match the right people with the right skills to the right roles, locations, and times at the right costs. This isn't just a “nice-to-have"; it's critical and the cornerstone of exceptional customer service and profitable growth in an ever-evolving, complex world.
With strategic workforce blueprinting, your bank can anticipate and address future business and workforce needs, unlock cost savings, boost efficiency and productivity, and stay ahead of your competition.