Prevent developer burnout to stay ahead of financial services innovation

The world is experiencing unprecedented volatility in the jobs market. Beyond the rise in inflation as workers seek higher salaries, there is also a risk financial services organisations could be restricted by limited access to talent as they embark on critical digital transformation

projects. There’s already a major shortage of skilled developers, and the talent pipeline may be further curtailed if overwork causes existing staff to leave in search of better opportunities elsewhere.

There’s no silver bullet to this problem, but automation has huge potential help to reduce the repetitive manual processes that can lead to developer burnout. If banks and insurers are able to harness automation effectively, and also focus more efforts on empowering non-technical users to deliver transformation projects, they may be able to drive a dramatic competitive advantage.

Accelerating the digital shift

The banking sector was undergoing digital transformation well before the pandemic hit. However, the huge disruption it caused to internal working culture and customer engagement gave many an extra incentive to move towards the cloud. These rapid investments helped to soften the impact of mass remote working and the forced closure of high street branches. Now things are opening up again, the momentum is far from slowing down.

According to a report from analyst Information Services Group (ISG) earlier this year, a key driver for this momentum is open banking – an area in which the UK is described as a world leader – and the rising profile of fintechs. Competition for traditional banks is increasing, with an estimated 89,000 finance firms now operating in the UK. In response, banks are keen to shift away from mainframes and towards more agile cloud infrastructure. This will not only lower costs but also help them meet growing customer demand for more innovative digital services, including those powered by AI and blockchain.

Facing a short supply

The challenge is that financial institutions increasingly don’t have the skilled IT resources to help them achieve their goals and deliver innovation projects. Demand for developers was already outstripping supply even before the pandemic, but the dramatic two-year crisis gave many reason to pause and reconsider their careers and current roles. What’s now known as “the Great Resignation” is making it harder for 93% of organisations to retain skilled developers, according to new research.

As if that weren’t enough, those IT specialists that have stayed in their roles are feeling the pressure rise. One report found that the number of digital projects doubled during the pandemic, increasing the workload for developers already struggling to stay on top of things. It found that only a third (37%) of organisations were able to complete all of their digital transformation  projects last year as a result. It’s not just the scale of the workload that’s a challenge, but also the inefficient tools and processes IT teams are expected to work with, which limit their productivity.

Developer burnout is therefore becoming a very real and growing risk. A perfect storm of increasing workload, skills shortages, day-to-day demands, and inefficient working practices is threatening to undo all the gains banks have made over recent years as they’ve invested in new technologies.

Relieving the pressure with automation

IT leaders urgently need to find new ways to relieve the pressure on their skilled IT resources and attract new talent to their business. By automating more routine and repeatable development work and empowering business users outside the IT department to deliver transformation, financial services firms can usher in a new era of innovation-fuelled growth.

Some 91% of organisations say automating key processes would help teams do more with less. From AI-powered customer-facing chatbots to robotic process automation (RPA) for payments processing, banks have been leveraging more streamlined systems for some time. In the developer’s world, such capabilities could be used to automate the service desk, improve security testing, and accelerate the migration of customer data from legacy to digital systems. 96% of financial services organisations either have already, or are currently deploying automation to improve operational efficiency and enhance customer experience.

Ushering in the business technologist

Even more exciting is the prospect of handing some development tasks to business technologists – employees outside the IT department who have the ability to deliver their own innovation. With the right set of low and no-code tools, combined with automation of key development processes, users could simply drag and drop reusable IT capabilities to create new customer experiences. This can be best enabled through API-led integration. By exposing applications, data, and devices through reusable APIs, financial services IT teams can embrace a composable enterprise strategy. That approach empowers business users to drive their own digital change, while ensuring IT still maintains a level of oversight.

This aligns perfectly with the new era of open banking fast emerging in the UK and beyond. As this trend continues, banks will increasingly need to create products as modular and interchangeable components. In this way, services can be seamlessly integrated with other internal and third-party offerings to deliver personalised experiences. Increasingly, the winners in financial services will be those capable of embracing this change to create the innovative experiences customers demand.