Human capital

FST quizzes Martin Allen, Financial Trainer and Consultant for CSE-Demos, about the importance of staff development with the financial services industry.

FST. A good training and development programme for your personnel is sometimes seen as ‘nice to have’ rather than an essential business need. In the competitive financial services industry how far is this view justified?
MA. Training and Development should always be ‘need to have’. Companies rarely, if ever, stand still – they either grow and flourish or they atrophy and wither. Not having a focused and budgeted training plan for all staff suggests that a company is preparing itself for atrophy. Further, company managements, concerned that they lose their best staff to their competitors, sometimes put forward the argument that it is a waste of money for them to train their staff just to prepare them for a move to a better job elsewhere. This is easily countered: if you make sure that yours is the best job/career path on offer through training, and of course through personal development and Reward, your staff will have no need to look anywhere else.

FST. A key issue across industry is the quality of management leadership. How can empowering managers at the upper and middle levels of an enterprise really impact on overall performance?
MA. Empowerment is becoming a buzzword but, fortunately, not a cliché.
Successful companies are increasingly developing their new and existing managers with the mantra: it is better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. That’s true empowerment but, and it is a big, it must be followed through. Any staff member chastised for making the wrong decision will revert, understandably, to asking permission and the desire of making the whole greater than the sum of the parts will be lost.

FST. In financial services a great deal of effort is spent around training for compliance activities. Does the industry get the balance right between training staff to think on their feet or ‘tick the boxes’ for specific compliance activity?
MA. Part of the problem here is with the regulatory guidelines and the regulators themselves. Where a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach is encouraged by regulators, then a box-ticking solution will be delivered, but without any real thinking about the issue. The introduction of a risk-based approach – similar to that being reinforced by the anti-money laundering guidelines from the Joint Money Laundering Steering Group – encourages initiative and real decision-taking and will result in a company, and an industry, that, overall, is tighter in its compliance activity.

FST. How can financial services firms differentiate themselves to their customers through looking after their staff training better?
MA. Financial services customers have always been reluctant to change their service provider on the basis that ‘all banks are the same, so I can’t be bothered to change’. And banks have made money on the back of this reluctance by not necessarily offering the best products to their customers.

The real winner in the quest for domination in the financial services industry will be the one that really gets customer service right. And customer service begins with treating your staff better. There is a direct and provable correlation linking clear business strategies, to excellent staff development, training and support (and reward) to first-class customer service, and, ultimately, to customers buying more products – increasing their wallet-share – from your company. Unfortunately, too many financial service providers continue to believe that reducing staff levels (costs) can be achieved at the same time as increasing sales (income). And while that may be true on the short-term, it’s unlikely to deliver a long-term strategic solution.

FST. What benefits can a third-party training specialist offer to a large financial institution?
MA. A third-party training specialist can offer three key benefits to any large financial institution:
• Impartiality – a genuine and independent view of a company’s training requirements that is not influenced by the cultural baggage of actually working for the company
• Quality – any training specialist worth the name will utilise leading-edge exponents (either on their staff or as associates) who can introduce the step-change that the company expects and needs
• Respect – no matter how good they are, internal trainers will always carry a degree of the ‘what can you tell me about my job?’ from their peers

FST. Can you tell us about your company’s solutions in this space?
MA. The company’s solutions cover three main areas:
• Breadth – covering all the skills, knowledge and experience that any financial services company will need
• Depth – covering them all at a level that always exceeds the expectations of the company receiving the training
• Flexibility – able, with ease and speed, to recommend genuinely bespoke solutions and not regurgitate generic solutions that others are already using