Robotics Process Automation Vs Human Experience in FinTech
* The article was initially published on our blog.
Description: In this article, Armada Labs delves in history lessons and up-to-date statistics to find out whether technology-driven FinTech is leaving space for non-technical people of age and what should be done to secure fair job distribution for all industry participants.
History is full of naysayers declaring this or that activity too complex for machines, only for machines to prove them wrong a few years later. If you’re a history buff, you might be aware of who the Luddites were. If not, here you go. The Luddites were a secret group of people who destroyed machinery in England in the early 19th century. Their reason was that machines were doing their work more efficiently, and they Luddites did not want to be jobless. The point of this history lesson is that there have typically been three subsequent responses over time to new technology:
- You can resist it and be overwhelmed;
- You can ignore it and risk being blindsided along the way;
- You can embrace it and harness its power
The same holds true with FinTech as it did with the textile machinery the Luddites abhorred over 200 years ago. The problem then was that Luddites spent way too much time thinking about what jobs machines are going to take away from people, and not nearly enough time thinking about what people and machines can do together that could never be done before.
Such things as robots, smartphones, social media, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality immediately come to the mind of people referring to a newer generation whose mindset drastically differs from those Luddites. Millennials are not afraid of technology — instead, they consider it as a great enabler of mobility that delivers everything quickly right here and now. Young people are accustomed to getting information on their phones on demand, and they expect that same turnaround from normal business processes that have been out there for years.
As younger consumers are entering the market, this trend of utilization of technology and technology-enabled spending continues gaining traction. Modern customers longing for the same level of service and innovation from financial products that they get from the American GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon) or Asian BATX (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, or Xiaomi) companies turn the industry into a never-ending technology race for better customer experience.
But FinTech is not only about spending and customers acquisition — on the other end of a supply chain there are people who design, manage and deliver these cutting-edge solutions and whereas FinTech consumers have no difference in age, gender or race, this beautiful equality hardly holds true when it comes to FinTech providers who got a better feeling of Luddites’ reality.
The Perks of Being Millennials in FinTech Industry
The FinTech challengers are continuously innovating to uplift and moving towards a brighter future. The benefits of processes automation brought to the industry are transforming the nature of work and forcing incumbent financial institutions to redesign most jobs. Today individuals need to have a better grasp of technology to remain employable.
A new report from British insights firm IHS Markit revealed that big banks like Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase are dropping thousands of full-time positions at-risk roles including customer-service reps, financial managers, and compliance and loan officers replacing them with smart underwriting mechanisms and chatbots.
European banks are shedding jobs as well in fact, banks’ investment into automation is well underway. A detailed 2018 report from Business Insider Intelligence noted that banks are already using AI to mimic bank employees, automate processes, and preempt problems. Societe Generale is cleaning thousands of databases to make room for machine learning tech while Nomura spokesman said that robots could replace as many as 10,000 human jobs within five years.
At the advent of Forth Industrial Revolution, young workers are much better prepared for leveraging these robust technological substitutes since the lion’s share of their existence they have spent dealing with technology either studying or developing it. Statistics show that as much as 84% of people born from the mid-1980s to early 2000s chose Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) as their majors, now they are proactively driving digital transformation to further hallmarks.
FinTech is obviously entwined with Millennials but what about non-technical financial professionals in their middle 50’s whose jobs are being eliminated in front of an automation onslaught?
Navigating Future Job Market
Finance remains a foreign industry for most people and technology is not helping them become literate. No matter how good you are at programming robots, without the basic understanding of money, credit, savings, and payments you won’t make it work. Usually, young technical workers lack any financial background that is essential for developing valuable FinTech solutions.
Thus, instead of laying off existing professional workforce, banks and financial companies should get them involved as mentors and thought leaders for younger employees. In this scenario, human experience is no waste as technology advancement is considered as an extension of human workers’ capabilities that gives people of age the opportunity to upskill and migrate from more manual work to higher value activities such as analysis, investigations, problem-solving and developing and managing robots.
Consequently, routine tasks will be increasingly automated, while technology-aided creative work expands and evolves in response to a growing array of unmet needs. As just one example, by helping us “see” much more richly the evolving lending space, analytical algorithms based on machine learning (ML) and artificial neural networks apply additional data sources to get more powerful risk estimation. However, the addition of alternative data to the credit score ingredients without humans rethinking the recipe is nothing but a farce, so mutually beneficial co-existence is an imminent solution here.
Most of us have an understandably negative reaction to the mounting performance pressure that is already beginning to accompany FinTech transition to new forms of work.
Armada Labs came up with some meaningful insights to help individual engaged in the financial services industry remain productive and achieve more of their potential.
1) Engage in Lifelong Learning. To keep their skills current, workers must increasingly do whatever is necessary to accelerate their learning, including pursuing a diversity of work experiences or working for multiple “employers” at the same time.
2) Love What You Do. Instead of just viewing a job as a means to a paycheck, we need to find a way to pursue work that we are truly passionate about then every obstacle on our way would seem insignificant.
3) Embrace a Growth Mindset. Individuals who believe their talents can be developed through hard work, good strategies, and input from others tend to achieve more than those who believe their talents are innate gifts.
FinTech transition is inevitable. You’re living in it now. In the course of our study, we have proved that non-technical individual, as well as people of age, have all the chances to participate in this transition fully due to their hands-on experience and an eye for the financial industry.
For them to effectively adapt to these turbulent forces and their effect on the redesign of work and jobs, they need to set their sights on longer careers, with multiple stages, each involving ongoing training and reskilling.
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