How To Impart Banking Training Successfully
Banks have faced complicated situations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, because people stopped visiting banks due to social distancing. In this situation, the banks had to learn to provide remote banking. Banking tellers had to understand how to provide good services to customers, including financial advice and back office operations, remotely. Since banks had to shift employees to handle these areas due to a new business need, reskilling was needed. Banks had to segregate teams for specific tasks, and train more active employees to handle a multichannel environment. All operations had to be digitalized in the COVID-19 pandemic and in post-pandemic phases. Therefore, banks had to think of ways to strategically capitalize on this change through services and products, and to reskill the workforce for it via banking training.
What Has Been The Impact Of Automation In Banking?
Banking automation has been happening rapidly, so the staff need to be trained to cope with these changes. With less need to focus on desk services, banks have been able to focus more on investment-based services. Automation in banking is used in many sectors, such as in money transfers and purchasing travel insurance. This kind of automaton has also been happening due to the prevalence of smartphones, through which customers are able to make transfers anywhere via net banking. Bank customers can check their balance through mobile apps, rather than going to the bank in person and checking it through an assistant. These are the effects of automation in the banking sector:
1. Less Manpower Needed
Since the requirement for banking clerks is not the same 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 to use in the system. This prevents banks from making compliance-based errors, because no detail about a customer is ignored. Therefore, 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.
Banking customers can also be made aware of any large transactions, so that they can supervise their source. They can monitor the source of funds and whether they have originated by unscrupulous means. There is also a sanctions list of national and international organizations and governments that contain the names of people who are not allowed to conduct transactions in a country.
2. Adherence To Compliance Rules
Bots can screen all the potential customers of a bank against sanctions 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 their card and ask the bank to block it, for which human discretion is needed.
When software is used to prevent money laundering, it detects large cash transfers and deposits. In this case, bank officers are notified by the program when the transaction levels exceed a maximum. 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 reduced services offered during the pandemic, they chose to redeploy them by providing banking training. Also, it’s not healthy for a brand’s reputation to lay off employees. So the banks have to reskill people, but how should they go about it?
- Conducting a needs analysis is essential for effective banking training
Before making any reskilling effort, banks have to do a needs analysis. This will help them know what skills will be 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 offered by banks, they need to train employees for it. When banks do not have their reskilling targets properly decided, their attempts to do so won’t be successful. Even employees in general roles need to be taught other roles as well.
3. Skill Closeness
As far as reskilling is concerned, it has to be expedient, so that banks don’t lose business. 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 can find the best resources for training, and save time and money on it. In fact, such reskilling requires the least time (one or two days) and can deliver brilliant results. It also saves the bank the costs 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. Bank tellers were also trained to handle KYC verification, because customers opened bank accounts online. Banks could only choose people for customer representative roles based on skill assessment.
4. Introducing A Learning Culture
The next element for making a banking training program successful is encouraging a learning culture. This can be done by top-level management only. Employees must be alerted about content uploads through notifications, and even senior management can participate in such initiatives. For this, bank employees must be sent messages about reskilling from the top management.
When the employees receive messages from the top management about a banking training program, it enhances their morale [1]. Moreover, if the bank's senior officers assert the need for talent development, the 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.
5. Involving The HR Professionals
Help from HR is also needed, which can help a bank determine the kind of talent it needs for its growth. Banks require distinct skillsets to attain the right talent for its growth strategies. With adequate help from HR, the business can also recognize the people who need training for future bank roles. HR is specialized in tasks such as skill mapping. A banking training program needs to deploy the right Subject Matter Experts to pass on the right skills to the right people.
References:
[1] DO BANKS REQUIRE A BANKING TRAINING PROGRAM? IF YES, WHY?
Originally published at creativtechnologies.com.
