Finastra right skills for the future of fintech
Finastra is a global fintech powerhouse, building the applications, marketplaces and ecosystems that power modern finance. As a global leader, it needs to have the right skills to be ahead of the market and drive innovation. Their leadership team recognises the importance of adopting a more dynamic approach to identify, prioritise and manage skills across their business. In short, winning in the market requires knowing the skills you need to outperform, and driving them effectively as core to the delivery of your strategy.
Simply’s Rightskilling Platform quickly simplified Finastra’s role catalogue and generated a market-aligned skills library, underpinned by the latest insight from the labour market, alongside what would most move the dial towards the delivery of their strategic goals. This enabled over 8000 employees to access career development resources closely aligned to their ambitious strategy.
We need to talk about skills
“We knew there had to be a better way to cut through the complexity of skills”
Finastra seeks to lead the market, as the world’s largest pure-play financial services software company, with solutions across lending, payments, treasury and capital markets and banking. As a pioneer in open finance, they combine enormous industry expertise, open technology and a global ecosystem. They serve over 8,600 financial institutions worldwide with an organisation of over 8000 people.
Finastra’s collaborative, open culture is designed to empower their people and communities across the globe. With the broadest, deepest portfolio of software applications available in financial services, Finastra can draw on a massive range of skills and experience to delight customers.
But the leadership team recognises that they can’t stand still. Leading the market with new, innovative technology solutions means that Finastra needs to lead the market for skills, not follow. “We needed a new conversation about skills” says Clare Courtney, SVP Organisational Effectiveness, “to enable us to continue to innovate and rapidly transform our existing products and services for our customers and partners.”
Getting a grip on skills, quickly
Finastra was already making progress on its skills agenda, but it needed to move quicker as the pace of digital transformation accelerated because of the Covid-19 pandemic. “Across HR we have been working to simplify how we talk about roles, jobs and skills. But it was taking months and years to do, and by the time the work is finished, it is out of date” says Clare.
The business knew the enormous value of getting organised around skills, as well as the role of support and tools to accelerate their progress. The team recognised the need to have a strategy. To identify and prioritise critical skills to deliver Finastra’s corporate goals. They also needed to provide clarity to colleagues on career development. Joining it all up required a different approach.
Clare and her team decided to turn to Simply, “We knew there had to be a better way to cut through the complexity of skills, and that a one-time solution would be inadequate in a fast-moving industry like fintech.”
Why Finastra chose Simply
Like any large company, Finastra has a range of HR technology solutions in place. Clare and her team explored their existing tools but found that there was no easy-to-use solution that would help bridge the gap between the strategic and operational use cases for skills.
“The ‘so what?’ of skills was really important to us” notes Clare, “we needed to make sure we were focused on the right skills to deliver our business strategy, and then connect this to our offer to employees, our job architecture, our systems of record, our learning offer and so on.” Finastra had limited ways to take a joined-up view of skills across their business and make informed decisions about where to focus and why.
To make rapid progress, Finastra chose to use Simply’s Rightskilling software to:
Strategy: Identify critical skills to deliver their strategy
Strategy: Benchmark skill priorities against their competitors and peer companies
Architect: Build and maintain a simple, market-aligned role catalogue and skill taxonomy
Rightskill: Estimate the skills of their current workforce
Rightskill: Enable colleagues to explore reskilling, upskilling and career pathways
How Finastra uses the Simply Platform
Identify critical skills to deliver their strategy
Finastra no longer relies just on opinions to identify the critical skills required to deliver their future business outcomes. With Simply’s Strategy functionality, Finastra can use machine learning to translate their desired capabilities, drawn from strategy documents and plans, into the skills most often required to deliver them. For example, pinpointing the importance of specific high-growth technology skills such as Kubernetes and DevSecOps, alongside foundational skills such as cloud platform and domain knowledge.
Having access to this rich picture of roles and skills by capability enables the team to short-cut to potential solutions before engaging the business to finalise a workforce plan. It brings rigour, objectivity and clarity to the process as it is underpinned by labour market benchmarks.
Benchmark skill priorities against their competitors and peer companies
With Simply’s talent intelligence tools, Finastra can use deep insight into the external labour market for roles and skills to learn from other organisations. These insights help inform critical skills and feed a simple gap analysis between Finastra’s key skills and the players who excel in capabilities they seek to emulate.
With this level of detail, the team can identify specific critical skills within business areas where they see gaps and opportunities. By engaging key leaders with this evidence and insight, workforce planning actions were taken such as amending hiring plans and updating learning actions to close gaps and build on strengths.
As the market continues to evolve, Finastra is now equipped to respond to market trends, enabling business leaders and HR teams to adapt and reconfigure as conditions change, therefore keeping the gap between the market and their business strategy and tactics as closely aligned as possible.
Build and maintain a simple, market-aligned role catalogue and skill taxonomy
Finastra needed to join up roles and skills and make this accessible to HR, managers and colleagues across the business. Instead of more hard work manually collating skills from business leaders, Simply’s Architect tools include industry specific role profiles and over 30,000 associated skills, which were used to populate the skills library in weeks. Both transferable (business or human) skills and technical (functional) skills were included. From problem solving to Python, and teamwork to TensorFlow.
Finastra has adapted the taxonomy, adding Finastra specific product knowledge and domain skills as they maintain the taxonomy. This evidence based, market-led approach helps inform decisions on how to describe roles and skills consistently, building a common understanding and language around roles and skills across the business.
Estimate the skills of their current workforce
The same industry specific profiles are fused with Finastra’s people data to reveal the potential skills available in the workforce today. By using information such as job title, role, job family and business unit, Simply’s Rightskill tools automatically populate skill profiles for each position.
This ‘map’ of skills enables HR teams to make informed decisions on where to target further analysis of skills within the organisation in further depth, such as through a skills inventory exercise. Additionally, the map reveals the overlap between distinct roles in the organisation, giving HR practical, actionable insight into where there might be an over or under supply of skills in the workforce as business demand changes over time.
Enable colleagues to explore reskilling, upskilling and career pathways
As Clare explains, “A critical part of Finastra’s open approach is to put in place the tools to help everyone succeed and grow with the business.” While getting a grip on skills was critical to business performance, there is a need to take employees and managers on the journey too. A key part of this was to enable employees to explore different ways to progress their career at Finastra, including though lateral moves to gain new skills and experiences.
To deliver this, all Finastra employees have access to dynamic career pathways generated using Simply’s Rightskill tools. The tools show which roles have similar skill requirements, enabling employees and managers to explore different routes through the business. In this case, employees can search through nearly 10,000 different possible moves across the company. Over three-quarters of the moves are lateral, supporting Finastra’s aim to encourage exploration and discovery of new opportunities.
Support
Skills can seem difficult to get started with, but it does not have to be complex and terrifying. Through it all, the Finastra team have placed high value on the expertise and support of the Simply team. As Ann Centis, Director of HR for Finastra says, Simply were “beyond supportive in navigating this new skills journey – we really couldn’t have done it without you!”
Making skills easy
“Simply made it easy to drive open careers and skill development”
Finastra have seen notable change in how their leaders, managers and employees think about and engage with skills. Employees, and their managers, can now better understand the skills needed to grow their career in their preferred roles, and work towards acquiring the critical skills Finastra needs for the future. Four in five employees surveyed agreed that the tools helped them better understand the skills they need to grow.
For the business and HR leadership teams, “Simply made it easy to identify critical skills, pull out the skills for the future and their rich data and insight gives us a platform to drive open careers and skill development” says Clare. But that is just the start, with Finastra using Simply to power their approach to skills-led workforce planning, it has the framework and momentum to build on the foundations set by the skills management solution.
Simply. The rightskilling platform.
The strategy-led, data-driven way to conquer skill gaps.
Simply uses data and machine learning to define your skills strategy, build the skills architecture you need to make it happen, and pinpoints how to rightskill your workforce, fast. Learn more here, follow Simply here or get in touch at info@simplygetresults.com to discuss your needs and book a demo.