Banks have faced complicated situations due to the Covid 19 pandemic. It’s because people stopped visiting the banks due to social distancing. In this situation, the banks had to learn how to provide remote banking. The banking tellers had to understand how to provide good services to customers, including financial advice and back office operations, all remotely. Since banks had to shift people to those areas due to a new business need, banking training was needed. Banks had to segregate teams for specific tasks and train more active employees to handle a multiple-channel environment. All operations had to be digitalized in the covid and post-pandemic phases.

Therefore, banks had to think of ways to strategically capitalize on this change through services and products and reskill the workforce for it via banking training.

These are the effects of automation in the banking sector:

What has been the impact of automation in banking?

Banking automation has been happening rapidly, so the staff needs to be trained to cope with these changes. With the need to use lesser services, banks have been able to focus more on suggesting investment-based services. Automation in banking is getting used in many sectors, such as money transfers and purchasing travel insurance. This kind of automaton has also been happening due to smartphones through which customers are able to make transfers anywhere via net banking. Their customers can check their balance through mobile apps rather than going to the bank in person and checking it through an assistant. Hence, automation has led to the following changes in the banking system now:

• Lesser manpower needed:

Since the requirement for banking clerks is not the same anywhere due to customers not using checks to transfer money, they had to be shifted to other roles. For withdrawals also, customers use ATMs, eliminating the need for a banking clerk. With the use of software in banking, there is no scope for errors because it knows which data has to be inputted into the system. This prevents banks from making compliance-based errors because no details about a customer are ignored. Therefore, the banks don’t commit crimes like money laundering even unknowingly. In fact, with the aid of software, banks can detect customers with riskier profiles and be more cautious about accepting their money and transactions.

The banking employees can also be made aware of any large transactions so that they can supervise who is behind them.

They can monitor the source of funds and whether they have not originated from any unscrupulous means. There is also a sanctions list of national and international organizations and governments that contains those people who are not allowed to conduct transactions in any country.

• Adherence to compliance rules:

The bots can screen all the potential customers of a bank against such lists and ensure that no one present on them gets approved for any transaction. ATMs also didn’t replace the tellers in banks completely because someone could lose his card and ask the bank to block it, for which human discretion was needed.

When software is used to prevent antimoney laundering, it detects large cash transfers and deposits. In that case, the bank officers are notified by the program when the transaction levels exceed a minimum. The bank officers know very well what to do in such situations when they have been given banking training.

Although banks could have fired people due to the lesser services offered due to the pandemic period, they chose to redeploy them by providing banking training. Also, it’s not healthy for a brand’s reputation to lay off. So the banks have to reskill people, but how should they go about it.

 The following measures ensure that a bank’s reskilling program is successful:

Conducting a needs analysis is essential for effective banking training

When the banks do not have their reskilling targets properly decided, their decisions won’t be successful. Even employees in general roles need to be taught other roles as well. However, before making any reskilling effort, banks have to do a need analysis. It can help them know what skills are in demand in the future. For example, banks need skills for financial advice now because many of their customers want to save more than before. Since remote financial advice is a common feature of banks, it needs to train for it.

• Skill closeness:

As far as reskilling is concerned, it has to be expedient so that banks don’t need to lose business at all. Therefore, they need to reskill those employees whose skills are the same as the roles for which the bank requires manpower. By assessing skill closeness, the banks find the best resources for training and save time and money on banking training. In fact, such kind of reskilling requires the least time(1- 2 days) and can deliver brilliant results.  It also saves the bank cost of hiring new resources.

For example, during the pandemic, banks had to do severe resource readjustment because the tellers had to act as customer representatives. A teller had to learn how to handle customer calls about products. The bank tellers were also trained to handle KYC verification because customers opened bank accounts online. The banks could only choose people for customer representative roles based on skill assessment. 

• Introducing a learning culture:

The next element of making a banking training program successful is encouraging a learning culture. This can be done by top-level management only. The employees must be alerted about any content upload through notifications, and even senior management can participate in such initiatives.For this, the bank employees must be sent messages about the reskilling from the top management. When the employees receive messages from the top management about a banking training program, it enhances their morale.

Moreover, if the banks’ seniors assert the need for talent development, the banking employees take it seriously. The employees get the idea that the entire enterprise is committed to promoting talent development in the organization.

It’s not easy to make employees adjust to new roles; hence training should be provided consistently. Banks need the help of various elearning vendors to provide content through various channels, including emails, intranet, and webinars.The employees must be evaluated for engagement levels to know whether the L&D content is successful.

• Involving the HR professionals:

But help from HR is also needed, which can help a bank determine the kind of talent it needs for its growth. It requires distinct skill sets to attain the right talent for its growth strategies. With adequate help from HR, the business can also recognize the right people who need training for future bank roles. It is because HR is specialized in tasks such as skill mapping. A banking training program needs to deploy the right subject matter experts to pass the right skills to the right people.