This strategy focuses on attracting digital talent
and requires that leaders understand the unique
needs of digital talent. It employs a diversified
approach to recruiting: engaging with technologist
communities, sponsoring hackathons to scout
talent, and ensuring that recruiters have experience
in technology. The best technical talent has a
disproportionately higher impact, so the ability to
attract and develop superior candidates is crucial. In
a similar vein, leading tech organizations enlist their
top performers in the recruiting effort.
Furthermore, banks need to improve retention
and reskilling. Reskilling may involve charting a
clear career development path for digital talent,
creating an environment that prioritizes and rewards
learning, and rewarding deep expertise over
fungible skill sets. There is also opportunity to build
capability-development programs that help reskill
nontechnical colleagues as technologists. Finally,
so that attracting and developing digital talent can
produce the desired results, banks need a clear
strategy for retaining this talent, such as providing
flexible and collaborative ways of working and
empowering digital talent to implement change.
To develop a comprehensive talent strategy, an
AI bank would first review existing initiatives, the
structure and makeup of each platform, and the
technical talent required to execute the strategy.
The second step is to build from the ground up
a model of talent required for the next stage of
growth, including both existing and future initiatives.
Next, it is important to create a set of talent
interventions that can tap into existing talent within
the organization, developing an “ecosystem” of
partners (vendors, developers, gig workers, remote
talent, and others) and using hiring mechanisms,
including the acquisition of smaller companies
and start-ups, to establish platforms requiring
skills beyond the traditional scope of the bank’s
roles and capabilities. Finally, banks have to make
themselves externally appealing to fresh tech talent
and internally exciting for their people. This means
transforming themselves so top technical talent
want to stay and grow within the organization and
so all employees see and embrace the change and
invest in upgrading their skills. In short, banks need
to become great engineering organizations.
4. Culture and capabilities
As banks build sophisticated technical solutions,
they also need to develop a culture suited to the
experts building these solutions. Organizations
need to manage culture and capabilities to create
a virtuous circle that attracts talent, sparks
innovation, and creates impact. This underscores
the importance of talent and culture in tech-enabled
transformations, including AI-bank transformations.
For the platform operating model to work, leaders
need to steer their organizations to focus on
the end user, collaborate across silos, and
foster experimentation. Establishing this digital
culture across the bank involves addressing four
dimensions of culture: understanding/conviction,
reinforcement, reskilling, and interaction.
First, understanding and conviction follow largely
from the bank’s leadership, expressed through
role modeling and encouraging desired behaviors,
including continuous learning, knowledge-sharing,
and interdisciplinary collaboration. For example, if
a top team visibly takes part in upskilling programs
for AI and machine learning, this demonstrates to
all in the organization the importance of automation
and evidence-based decision making to all parts
of the business. Another approach is to support
technology start-ups by giving them access to
nonsensitive code and shareable data to build their
own “open solutions” related to AI banking.
The second is to reinforce new practices with formal
mechanisms, so that the structures, processes, and
systems of the AI bank become embedded within
the culture. For example, banks might consider
organizing institution-wide innovation challenges
or inviting managers to daily huddles where they
actively work with the centers of excellence to solve
problems and own outcomes.
6
Abhishek Chakravarty, Dave Kerr, and Nina Magoc, “10 Principles That Build Great Engineering Organizations,” March 26, 2021, medium.com.
7
Reed Doucette and John Parsons, “The importance of talent and culture in tech-enabled transformations,” February 2020, McKinsey.com.
58Platform operating model for the AI bank of the future