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Gaurav Hasija, a native of Sonipat, aspired to be a banker. But he did not go to Shri Ram College of Commerce or seek enrolment in the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India that breaks more hearts than be a window to the banking world. Instead, he chose to study microprocessors and satellite communication.The road to becoming a banker is undergoing a transformation witnessed by the industry itself. As technology like blockchain and digital payments sweep aside conventional pillars such as ledgers and cash counters, banks looking for a place under the sun in the 21st century are picking up brains that would do things differently than accountants.Among the new hires at State Bank of India (SBI), those with commerce and accounting background always occupied the pride of place.In FY20, SBI hired 11,000 employees, up 10% from the previous year. These candidates will be deployed in different operational roles in the bank — from retail banking to processing and corporate banking. A majority of the employees in the probationary officer’s category are from the engineering background armed with special skill sets in the fields of artificial intelligence, data analytics, code checking, etc. This year SBI hired 300 IT professionals.“Engineers are being hired in the IT verticals as and when they are required but we have stepped up such hires and in the future as well we would look to hire such talent,” said Alok Kumar Choudhary, DMD (HR), State Bank of India. “The recruitment at the bank has also been strong and we plan to hire another 10,000 people in 2020.”India’s banking is undergoing a transformation with digital payments becoming 97% of the total banking transactions at the end October 2017, up from 95% in 2015, data from RBI shows. While the growth momentum may look minute, but the base of digital transactions has grown from Rs 148 lakh crore in October 2015 to Rs 239 lakh crore now. As smartphone began to proliferate, banks have also been reducing branches or slicing them into smaller pieces to bring down their operational costs.As these changes happen, aspirants are also finding that it would be easier to get into banks by studying engineering and equipping themselves with developments in technology and data crunching.Hasija, a 23-year graduate in electronics and communications engineering from Gurgaon Institute of Technology & Management (GITM), moved to pursue a two-year post-graduate diploma in banking and financial services from the RBIbacked National Institute of Bank Management (NIBM) in Pune.“The opportunity in banking is huge because it’s an important part of the economy and it straddles between specialisations like credit risk management or rural banking which has a huge potential. It is this opportunity that led me to this course,” Hasija, who expects to join the credit risk department of a bank, said.
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CULTURE SHOCKBanking in the conventional sense is that executives sit in a branch and serve customers who walk in either to deposit funds in their accounts, or seek loans for homes, or cars, or to run their small businesses.But the advent of technology in the past decade has turned things on their heads. It is no more an arm-chair job for nine hours a day. Bankers not only go out and seek business from potential customers, but they study consumer behaviour to find out their needs and cross-sell products.As banks mine tons and tons of data and use artificial intelligence to push loans or sell deals to customers, the need is more for those who have expertise in data analytics. That has opened opportunities for youth.“From a job opportunity perspective, the avenues are shrinking, but the demand for people is more specialised,” said Dipak Gupta, joint managing director at Kotak Mahindra Bank. “We need more hands-on data analytics, it’s a different skill set that is required not the routine ones. We are hiring more data analysts, passed out engineers, data scientists, statisticians, etc. Bulk of the job creation was largely sales-related in any case, these were not financial jobs.”Bank branches are not dead, but the way branch banking is being done is also undergoing a change.Banks, which are building new branches, are doing so in rural and semi-urban areas like Axis Bank which plans to add 550 branches this financial year recruiting 4,000 more employees in the last quarter of FY20.Axis has made a net addition of 12,800 people in the nine months to December but, more importantly, the bank has hired 800 employees in the past one year with new capabilities like big data analytics, digital, process automation, artificial intelligence, robotics and cyber security.K Ramesha, a former dean at NIBM and presently the director at the RBI-backed Indian Institute of Bank Management (IIBM), says the natural affiliation of engineers to mathematics makes them favourites to beat others in the common entrance texts.“Anyone can apply for these tests but the probability of an engineer scoring good marks and making the shortlist is higher because of their better skills in mathematics compared to an arts or commerce student,” said Ramesha. “Of course, there are specialised areas like law officers and IT officers which need certain qualifications but engineers by their ability to score higher marks in the common test automatically make it to the recruiters short list.”BYE BYE BRANCHESBranches were at the heart of banking once upon a time.Customers, who used to visit the branches for money transfers, these days prefer the digital channels. More importantly, a branch is no more crucial to a bank’s expansion because of the limitless possibilities in the digital world.The advent of UPI app to move even the small denomination payments, rising use of RTGS and IMPS for payments at the National Payments Corp window, standalone payment options such as Paytm, PhonePe, have all made branch visits redundant.“There has been continuous disruption in the financial services sector mainly due to digitalisation. Banks have been introducing and spreading their presence across newer financial products,” said Choudhary of SBI. “Even while banks are fast adapting to digital ways, these new services require manpower to reach the deeper rural pockets.”In 2019, nearly 74% of staff were at the branches and the remaining 26% were involved with other activities like sales and accounting. By 2025, it will fall to 55% at the branches, forecasts Boston Consulting Group.“In the physical world, the more people you had the more you could reach out to them but, in the digital world, the multiple changes crazily. For example, in the physical world a sales guy would meet two customers in a day, in the digital world the same sales guy meets at least 7-8 customers in a day because the process is fast,” said Gupta of Kotak.For bankers, the life has moved on to a departmental corporate life to being in the project mode, rather continuously.
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