Digital enablement offers substantial benefits for customers of financial services institutions — we know this. “Going digital” can also unlock huge benefits for employees, when implemented correctly. Unfortunately, evidence shows that this potential often remains untapped: 

“Given ignoring the ‘people’ element of a transformation accounts for 50 percent of digital transformation failure, inadequate employee engagement could have a 1.4 trillion USD price tag come 2026.” 

— Andy Whitmore, Director at 438, on the hefty price tag of global DT wastage 

How your employees experience digitalization from a cultural perspective will affect uptake, buy-in and innovation at all levels of your institution. 

When you get the employee experience right, you ensure the top-down mandate and passion to transform is carried through to every branch of the business. This is the secret sauce for success. 

So, how should FSIs factor employee experience into their digital enablement journey?

Deliver effective digital training to teams 

While 76 percent of employees consider it very or extremely important to work for an organization that is digitally enabled, only 38 percent believe their organization has equipped them with the skills they need to thrive. 

‍What is the real purpose of training? 

“Calling [Monzo] ‘just a current account’ is like calling a car a horseless carriage. [You] are missing the fundamental shift from commodity financial products to intelligent real-time services.”

— Jason Bates, co-founder at 11:FS and Monzo 

If we extend Jason Bates’s metaphor, your employees may well need to undergo a profound re-skilling that is the equivalent of retraining farriers to be car mechanics. This is not overstated. This isn’t just about using new tools. Your employees need to adopt a new mindset. Experts agree this is the linchpin of successful digital enablement projects. 

Change is scary to many people, though. Your employees have expertise in using existing systems, and authority based on knowledge that you’re now telling them is defunct. That knowledge is their currency, perhaps built up over decades in the case of middle management. It is something absolutely fundamental to a person’s job security. It’s a measure of their value. Employees will be afraid of losing all that they have built. Those fears must be addressed head-on with conviction, understanding, and positivity. 

Training, then, has to do one thing well: offer up more valuable knowledge so the employee feels like they’re winning out. 

The joyous thing is, they are. While the status quo is unsustainable, the future is bright. When you empower employees with a digital skillset, it puts them on a more prosperous and fulfilling career path. They will be thrilled to set down the horseshoe, pick up the wrench, and even hopefully reach for the oscilloscope. 

How to embed training in your FSI 

1. Anticipate training needs before deploying any initiatives

Although much of what FSIs are trying to do is to create pick-up-and-go digital processes, some kind of handover is often necessary from a psychological perspective. You will also want to retroactively identify further upskilling needs through regular surveys, performance reviews, and feedback from employees. 

2. Deploy or develop personalized training content, tailored to the specific needs of employees

Incorporate training into daily workflows with job aids, microlearning, and coaching. Use the Learning Pyramid model to truly embed training. This says that while a lecture has a five percent retention rate, a demonstration has a 30 percent retention rate. Discussing the topic bumps that up to 50 percent, and so on, until the trainee is able to teach another person, at which point the retention rate is 90 percent. That’s the level you want to reach. 

3. Use learning management systems (LMS) to track employee progress and close the feedback loop

Doing this allows you to regularly evaluate the effectiveness of the training and make adjustments as needed. Like digitization projects themselves, training should be an iterative, ongoing process, not an afterthought. 

Automate processes to deliver better customer services 

Of course, the promise of automation is that it helps employees to focus on higher-value tasks, reducing repetitive work and boosting productive engagement with customers. 

Three-quarters of The Economist’s 2023 survey respondents agree that FSIs will seek to differentiate on customer experience, rather than products, in the next five years. It’s every employee’s responsibility to be “customer-obsessed” in order to deliver that differentiation dream. Automation supports employees to zero in on the customer, not the process. 

This is something we’ve covered in some depth in our article on intelligent automation. To summarize how such developments impact employees: 

• Robotic process automation (RPA) can take over rote tasks like account opening, credit checks, and KYC, which are dull and time-consuming. Employees can then spend more time building customer relationships. 

• Generative AI can help agents on the phone with an instant summary of a complaint history (among many other use cases). So, they don’t have to read back through multiple interactions to piece together an understanding of the situation and start solving it. 

• Machine learning and real-time analytics allow employees to make data-driven decisions, faster. Better decisions make for more successful outcomes for customers (makes for a happy annual appraisal). 

These ideas are great in principle, but how do they play out in real life? Here are two examples of how digital automation has already improved employee experiences at these FSIs: 

Capital One 

In 2022, Capital One created an RPA app integrated with Salesforce to eliminate manual data entry for its Commercial Real Estate teams. Soon, this and other automations were deployed across multiple business units. Sales teams celebrated “getting their Friday back” — previously, lost to data entry. And weekly productivity increased by 20 percent. 

ANZ Bank 

Shayne Elliott, CEO of the largest institutional bank in Australia, said in an interview, “We have globally industry-leading employee engagement. We used to be in the high 60 to low 70 percent in engagement; now we’re in the mid-80 percent. These are some really good indicators.”

He was referring to the employee response to his ambitious program of digital initiatives, including the 2022 launch of ANZ Plus for automated digital banking. Clearly, employees are on board with these changes and are seeing the benefits of digital enablement. 

Changing people, transforming experiences 

Nigel Walder, COO at ClearBank said it best on the Fintech Insider podcast, “If you want to make a bank behave as if it was born on the internet, then most of that is all about cultural change and changing people, and very little of it is due to technology.”

Digital enablement is what we do at Modes, not just from a technological perspective, but from a cultural one, too. Our aim is to help financial institutions grow, tackling enablement journeys in a holistic way that empowers every employee and every customer. 

To learn more, contact us today.