Keeping up with speed and scale in the Finance Sector

November 12, 2020
by Richard Heritage

Struggling to keep pace with training demands? Unsure how to engage your learners in a digital world with dry training topics? Need to mobilize talent at scale to meet shifting consumer demands? You’re not alone. These are just some of the challenges facing many large companies in the Financial Services Industry. Read on to hear how some are tackling these challenges head on and paving the way for more strategic L&D.

L&D has been thrown into the spotlight. Never has it been more important to have an agile workforce that you can re-skill and upskill at speed and at scale. Organizations that invest in this will come out of the pandemic stronger.

Some businesses are nailing it…

When the pandemic hit, DBS, the largest bank in Southeast Asia, further accelerated development of its already highly sophisticated digital learning infrastructure. This allowed it to serve new customer needs and gave them a leg up in responding to the pandemic. Read more in the Josh Bersin Academy’s Big Reset report.

It took another multinational bank just three weeks to get all physical training into a digital format. They scrapped initiatives that wouldn’t work digitally and have now seen their best performance in the past decade.

Typically, in large, highly regulated companies with strict governance controls, new plans and projects can take months and even years to get the go-ahead.

The pandemic has changed this.

Business urgency, simple objectives and a focus on speed have ensured the most successful organizations support their workforce effectively by shortening internal timelines and making decisions faster.

There are plenty of examples of organizations that have embraced digital learning and are continuing to grow. But for each of these examples, there are those that have struggled with implementing new digital solutions. None more so than the financial sector.

Typically, these risk-averse companies prefer long-term predictability to short-term speed and agility.

5 challenges facing finance L&D teams

No one quite knows what is going to happen to global stock markets, consumer savings and corporate stability over the coming 2 to 3 years.

This economic uncertainty breeds one certainty: To survive and thrive, companies must be agile. This has to go beyond the CLO or CHRO talking about organizational agility. It has to go all the way down the ladder.

The ability to learn and relearn will become a critical skill. It is the responsibility of L&D to make that happen.

Talent mobility – with 60% of workforces having to learn new skills in response to COVID, talent mobility is key. In fact, talent mobility is what will drive the long-term economic predictability these financial institutions crave.
Employee engagement with online training – 49% of finance employees don’t read or listen to compliance training in detail. Getting attention and engaging learners is harder than ever. Don’t underestimate the cognitive load that lockdown worries, fears about economic stability and even elections add for employees! Read more about the importance of engaging training content.
Keeping up with constant regulatory updates – strict governance, long internal approval timelines, the need to localize and translate content for a global workforce…all of these make it harder for L&D to be agile in the face of change.
Learning technology – while some have the tech stack needed, others don’t. Traditionally, it can take months or even years to get new learning technology implemented. Many are making do with what they’ve got.
Competing business priorities – supporting global workforces during constant change, adapting to digital working environments, meeting changing consumer needs…There’s a lot for L&D teams to tackle right now, and it’s normal for teams to feel overwhelmed by the added workload brought about by the pandemic.

What does this mean for finance learning teams?

First, they need to nail their content strategy and choose the best modalities for engaging employees and enabling talent mobility.
Second, they need to work smarter to speed up and scale up the production of online training in a way that’s agile enough to meet changing business and regulatory needs.

How to futureproof finance L&D

Nail your learning content strategy to ensure ROI

Choose the right learning modalities to enable talent mobility. Incremental, repetitious, bite-size, on-the-job performance support is critical. If you don’t get the content strategy right, then your learning and training programs will fail to deliver value and ROI for the business.

Too many organizations solely focus on the delivery of content. But if you order a pizza delivery and it comes in 5 minutes, and they send the wrong pizza, you’re not going to want to order again! Getting the content right is essential for delivering change and motivating your learners to come back for more.

Brandon Hall Group’s Principal Analyst, Michael Rochelle, explained the importance of engaging content in a recent briefing with Elucidat. Watch the 5-minute clip:

Technology & People

In order to produce online training that will support and engage employees, L&D teams need to be set up for success.

Right now, I’m speaking to finance L&D teams who feel strained and like they’re a bottleneck because they’re unable to keep up with requests and demands from across the business.

Those that have successfully sped up and scaled up online training are leveraging the right technologies, implementing great processes and collaborating well with experts across the business.

Tips for your technology

Organizations need to put the right resources and tools in place to make it easy for people to make smart choices about their own development.

Forcing people to take 3-4 hour webinars or 2-hour elearning courses is not an effective way to motivate people to learn.

Learning experiences need to be personalized to the individual. Elucidat is built upon the principles of “People-centred learning.” We know from experience and research that our clients who create personalized learning see a far greater ROI. Learners are not only engaged, but they feel happier and will be more likely to strive for excellence in their role.

How to work smarter with Subject Matter Experts

SMEs are experts for a reason. Typically, they are devoted to their role and have worked hard to get there. This means they are usually time-poor too. At Elucidat, we believe that crowdsourcing elearning is the future and a great way to avoid L&D becoming a bottleneck.

Empowering SMEs to create high-quality elearning dramatically increases the volume of training you can create.

SMEs need clear communication on what is expected when it comes to producing online training and support when they need it. They also need tools that require minimal learning design experience.

More SMEs creating effective, bite-sized learning content will mean more personalized content for learners that will drive real behavior change in learners. For highly regulated industries, better, more relevant and timely updates to regulations distributed in a trackable way will also mean reduced risk.

Speed up. Scale up. Futureproof.

Business urgency and agreement on goals mean that even the most risk-averse financial institutions are prepared to change. COVID has presented the perfect opportunity to push for accelerated approaches to L&D

This all contributes to talent mobility. Get all the right resources in place to ensure people can continue to learn, and they are happy, adaptable and want to stick with the company.

To effectively adapt to constant change and future-proof themselves, financial organizations need to be agile. L&D is perfectly placed to enable this agility, but the focus for learning teams needs to shift from the “delivery” to the “content.”

Working better with your SMEs will ensure your learners get the most relevant content to help them excel in their current and future roles, whatever those may be!

Having the right tech in place with smart workflows and quality output is going to be critical to long-term success.

Having tools specifically designed for large organizations will yield the greatest ROI.

Get prepared for the year ahead

We’d love to hear about your biggest digital training challenges, and explore which strategies, processes and goals are best to prepare you for the coming year. Book a call with one of the team and we’ll personalize your feedback to give you the best results.