By Martin Hartley, Managing Director
What might 2023 hold for the finance industry in terms of consulting, IT and technology?
As it happens, a lot.
And despite the news, I think much of it will be positive. First of all, no business can run without good people, and diversification is the key here. Secondly, globalization is happening, and to our advantage. Thirdly, and of course no surprise, automation continues apace.
Bestshoring means we can support and deliver across multiple teams in multiple locations in a way that’s more difficult to achieve in-house.
2022 saw a lot of layoffs, many of them in Ireland where a lot of the big tech firms are based.
Conversely, other big players – the likes of Dell, Barclays and JP Morgan – came out and said they were hiring. In fact, the number of roles advertised eclipsed the one per cent that were dispersed into the market, so the net result is neither a surplus of consultants, nor a shortage.
As I see it, we’re basically back at neutral.
This is where globalization comes in.
At emagine, we talk a lot about Nearshoring, but we have also introduced a model that we have coined Bestshoring. This means choosing the best mix of solutions for the job, whether that’s UK, Poland or India, or any combination in between.
We may put a team of fifty in play, and of those, twenty may be in the UK, twenty in Poland and ten in India. It all depends on the brief. We’ll secure the best talent at the best price and the best location to deliver the programme.
We might have a set of developers in India who are brilliant, and much more affordable, but perhaps they don’t have the front office skills required to work in the UK. That’s where we as a consultancy can come in and manage the process on behalf of our clients, to make it work and ensure all the right elements are sourced and in place.
As a result, the projects we’re taking on are no longer a few people here and there, with some of the team managed by clients, some by us.
Bestshoring means we can support and deliver across multiple teams in multiple locations in a way that’s more difficult to achieve in-house.
We now have enough skin the game, and have earned enough trust to take on wholesale bodies of work and run with them, often managing teams of fifty-plus and ensuring delivery from start to finish.
UK banks have projects that just have to happen, but they don’t always have the budget. With Bestshoring, we can work out the best delivery combination and make it achievable and cost effective.
Looking to the future, the banking sector has a lot to learn from the automotive, consumer and retail sectors.
Of course, automation is not new, and the finance sector has long embraced tech in order to find new ways of streamlining, efficiencies in process and to provide better customer experience. But as automation, machine learning and AI moves on, so will we.
In eTrading the trend will be increasingly focussed on algorithms which isolate and implement trade opportunities and manage positions without publishing those intentions to the wider market.
We’ll see more uptake in Cloud solutions, with an increased uptake in using software as a service solution, and migration of services to the Cloud. The benefits here are reduced costs and increased efficiencies in trading, reporting and treasury.
User Interface (UI) technologies will be in higher demand than ever. Bringing out a new tool or system that isn’t easy to use, and is not well designed makes you look archaic. Many business banking apps are clunky to use and just don’t look good, so we expect to see a big uptake in UI tech going forwards.
AI is going to be deployed more and more to make those incremental improvements. Many of our systems are already automated, so how do we make them even quicker and more efficient? How do we eliminate bugs and mistakes?
Machine learning and AI are the solutions here. The more data that’s available, the more machine learning and AI can understand, improve and move forward.
Looking to the future, the banking sector has a lot to learn from the automotive, consumer and retail sectors.
Amazon are revolutionising the shopping experience with their pilot grocery shops. As long as you have an Amazon account, you can walk in, scan your phone, shop for your groceries and leave. That’s a pretty streamlined, efficient process and incredibly convenient for the consumer.
In automotive, the seemingly impossible is being achieved, with driverless cars edging ever closer to becoming reality, a trickle-down effect in incremental improvements implemented by Formula 1.
Similarly, the likes of the Amazon retail innovations will trickle down to the supermarkets, and in banking it’s essential to be innovating and pushing, and ensuring that improvements are adopted and implemented more widely once they’ve been proven.
We’re pretty optimistic for the year ahead at emagine – tech will never stop pushing improvements, and the nature of the beast means that it’s well-placed to ride out any recession, which if it arrives, looks set to be reasonably shallow and short-lived.
We’re pretty optimistic for the year ahead at emagine – tech will never stop pushing improvements.