#BeyondFintech: Preparing for jobs that don’t exist yet!
Last week, it was my pleasure to welcome someone to the Fintech & Payments Club who could provide some brilliant insights about what our audience should be doing to give themselves the best chance of success.
Tram Anh Nguyen, is the Co-founder of CFTE, the world's first fintech online learning platform. Before founding CFTE, Tram Anh had a successful career in market making and wealth management with Standard Chartered, Dresdner Kleiwort Benson and then UBS. Tram Anh and I were joined in this Clubhouse discussion by my co-host Darren Franks, Founder & CEO at TalentintheCloud.
If you weren’t able to join the conversation, here are the main topics we covered and the key learnings I took from it.
A new approach to fintech skills is needed
The finance industry is clearly in a transformational phase as a result of technological innovation that has been encouraged by supportive regulations. Cloud technologies, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are all playing their part, as are forward-thinking regulators in Singapore, France, the UK and other regions.
However, this transformation is not happening evenly across the world. There are huge differences between countries, both in terms of the services that consumers can access and the skills gaps that are emerging. In addition, the world of academia is not set up to prepare people for the future of fintech.
This is the backdrop against which CFTE is operating and the problem that it is aiming to solve. It is providing accessible knowledge about finance, technology and entrepreneurship to people around the world. It wants to help them learn from the best examples of fintech and employs fintech leaders, who are already disrupting the industry, as the teachers.
Learning about fintech is a global movement
Around 2016, while working on the trading floor herself, Tram Anh realised that technology was coming to disrupt her industry and that she would need to understand it if she was going to keep her job.
This was where the seed of the idea that grew into CFTE came from. It was all about empowering other financial professionals to upskill and remain employable in the future. At first, interest in the platform mainly came from Asia but since then, it seems the whole world has caught up with the realisation that they need to learn to survive.
Now, 40% of users are not from a finance background. They are technologists, journalists, teachers and other groups who want to get into fintech. It’s not just young people either, as older finance professionals have also come to the conclusion that they need these skills to do their jobs properly.
Another interesting dynamic is how many women are now using the platform. Even though the financial industry has not historically been the most diverse, 40% of users are women. There is a willingness amongst women to learn these important skills and they clearly find the idea of a career in finance more appealing than ever before.
They may also be encouraged by the fact that they can learn from people like Anne Boden of Starling Bank, who can tell them what she learnt about building a bank from scratch.
Everyone must understand the tech fundamentals
When asked whether they prefer to hire someone from a technology or a finance background, fintech founders say they want people who have a bit of both. If you don’t have the technology skills already though, this doesn’t mean you need to understand every aspect of technology in its entirety.
You need to understand the most important ones and how they are applied to your job. For example, AI and automation are major trends that will unlock huge amounts of value in the future, as well as replacing many administration jobs. You should therefore be trying to learn as much as you can about these topics and their implications, rather than feeling like it is necessary to build an AI tool yourself.
Start by learning how technology is used, what the most important components are and who the biggest players in the market are. With this level of knowledge, you can build towards a career in an area like product management, where technical skills are important but where it’s most essential to understand how various technologies are used.
Human skills will be valued in the future of fintech
As well as the technology knowledge you must build, it’s also important to learn how to think differently about disruption.
Within many work environments, someone’s job description is clear and they can see with certainty what tasks need to be completed. Learning new skills that prepare us for the future is therefore hard because we have lost the habit of learning that children have.
If you can learn and master certain human skills though, you are setting yourself up with exactly what the employers of the future will want. Skills like leadership, collaboration and creativity cannot be performed by machines but they are crucial. It’s also important to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and be able to demonstrate this to employers.
They want to see that you are curious, adaptable and able to build. If you can show a portfolio of projects that demonstrate these abilities, it could have much more impact than what university you went to.
This matters because everything will be fintech
The platforms built by the biggest technology companies have completely changed some industries like advertising already and now it's the turn of finance to be transformed. Embedded finance will be the great catalyst for change, turning everything into fintech and requiring every company to have a Chief Fintech Officer in future.
During the first stage of this evolution, partnerships between fintechs and banks are important. These are already occurring but they will happen more and more. Both finance and technology professionals will need to learn how these relationships can be mutually beneficial endeavours.
For people working within fintech companies, they will need to understand the important role that compliance plays in a bank’s decision making and the longer timeframes involved. On the other side, people working within banks must recognise that fintechs know they have to move fast or die.
The skills that are needed to make sure a partnership of this kind works are a mix of technical and human skills. However, what’s most important is to develop a mindset of adaptability and collaboration, as these skills will be crucial for the fintech jobs of the future.
To support this transition, CFTE has launched THINK, their platform for continuous education which covers topics from FinTech, BigTech, Blockchain, AI and RegTech.
THINK is an important development in CFTE’s journey because it takes us a step closer to CFTE’s mission of education at scale.
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