How financial services leaders and HR teams can leverage analytics for strategic partnerships?

According to The Business Research Company, the financial services market—encompassing everything from insurance and payments to lending and money management—is expected to reach $28.5 trillion by 2025. This growth results from companies rearranging their operations and recovering from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

HR teams need to provide the right support and guidance to meet strategic priorities, including supporting projected growth, competing for talent, and focusing on crucial diversity and employee well-being efforts. It’s a heavy task, but one that can be lessened by connecting workforce intelligence to provide people analytics and make data-driven decisions. 

Data-driven decisions

The financial services industry is no stranger to the value of data and analytics, including crucial areas such as customer cultivation and risk management. HR leaders can leverage internal data determine what’s happening within the workforce to take corrective action and retain top talent before it’s too late. With the added power of AI, HR can be agile and strategic to make a greater and faster impact on the organization.

HR digital assistants and intuitive interactive reports can also help managers in their decision-making. For example, managers can boost the productivity of teams and monitor employee engagement after a reorganization. Thanks to machine learning and easy-to-use mobile applications, they can understand the “why” behind effectiveness, engagement, or attrition figures.

Data-driven team management and new working models

Like countless other industries, COVID-19 has also accelerated the financial industry’s work from home (WFH) model. Financial organizations must continue to strategize on what sustainable hybrid working models will look like in the future and how technology can bridge any possible gaps.

HR teams, managers, and employees get the benefits of a data-driven approach during company reorganizations, hybrid work model adoption, and agile organization transformations. For instance, more customers are moving their banking online due to the pandemic, which impacts the role of the traditional branch and bank worker. Financial leaders understand these implications, with a recent Accenture report stating that 97% of bank leaders believe that branches will need to be re-designed in the next one to two years. This approach also aids in planning digital redeployments and reskilling current employees to develop new digital banking skills to offer remote financial advice or support back-end day-to-day operations.

Creating an analytical HR culture

As an example, Generali, a leading insurance company in Italy, uses analytics to guide its HR decisions. The complexities of tracking 70,000 employees working in more than 50 countries were previously very manual, with HR departments manually compiling data in templates and sending them to the head office team for reporting and analysis purposes. This approach was time-consuming and susceptible to errors, so leadership sought a solution to automate its reporting functions.

A data-driven approach and a Human Capital Management solution helped the insurance giant advance decision-making and improved the meritocracy and allocation of people by integrating data from different sources. These analytical insights help Generali hire the right people and predict attrition, so that HR managers can take preventive action. By improving their analytics functionality, Generali HR can partner with executives on key insights about employee management while integrating data from different sources. Furthermore, the built-in use of machine learning helps increase reporting speed even while Generali increases data volumes. Overall, Generali’s HR community has embraced a more analytical culture, which supports the decision-making process with meaningful and easy-to-use workforce analytics.

Improving plans, predictions, and agility in response to external disruptions has made extracting insights from front- and back-office systems a top business priority for financial organizations.