The worlds of work, technology and financial services (FS) are changing at high speed. Over the course of this blog series, I’ll be delving into a new Accenture report and some of the insights it offers into how FS organizations and their workforces will need to evolve to stay the pace.
Some of the important changes are about people—customers and employees. Their expectations are rising as startups and technology companies set new benchmarks for customer and workforce experiences. Younger workers, especially, come into the workplace with new demands and ways of thinking and collaborating.
The pace of technology change, too, is accelerating. Disruptive technologies that automate mundane tasks and processes, or that augment human expertise, creativity and skill with real-time information and new capabilities will completely change the shape of the FS workforce over the next five to 10 years.
7-10% OF TASKS IN THE FS WORKFORCE COULD BE AUTOMATED BY 2025
Accenture economic value modelling shows that 7-10 percent of tasks in the FS workforce could be automated by 2025, while 43-48 percent could be augmented with technology. The cost savings and productivity gains could deliver between $87 billion and $140 billion of cumulative value, between now and 2025, for the North American FS industry alone.
Against that backdrop, FS organizations need to prepare for the augmented and automated workforce of the future. But in reality, automation projects at many banks, insurance carriers and capital market firms are small-scale, tactical and siloed by nature. These practices dilute full value capture.
FS executives in our Future Workforce survey said only one in four of their employees are ready to work with intelligent technologies. That’s despite the fact that 67 percent of FS C-suite executives agree artificial intelligence will be critical to their organization’s ability to differentiate in the market.
To unlock the value proposition of the new workforce and the next wave of digital technologies, FS organizations need to take a top-down, cross-functional view of the roles and functions in the enterprise. This will help them understand where they can drive the most value.
Then they need to focus strategically on the roles that are best suited to being reinvented through the application of automation, and that offer the most potential for rapid and sustainable return on investment. Finally, they should have a point of view on what to do with the capacity released through automation, consistent with the values of the organization.
In my next post in this series, I will look at what our economic value modelling reveals about the FS workforce of the future. Until then, you can register to read our report, Workforce 2025: The Financial Services Skills & Roles of The Future, to find out more about how augmentation and automation will change the FS workforce over the next five years.
