Challenges abound today in the banking sector. While "deposits, deposits, deposits" seems to be a popular overarching theme, banks and their executives are being challenged on a variety of fronts, including regulation, the economy, to attracting the right people for the right jobs.
We asked attendees at Tearsheet's The Big Bank Theory Conference last week what their 3 biggest challenges were. They wrote their lists on Post-It Notes and stuck them to a glass wall.
The 3 top challenges mentioned most frequently by attendees to TBBT 2023 were:
- Talent: This includes finding the right talent, attracting young talent, managing large teams, and a general lack of talent
- Regulation: This includes a lack of regulatory clarity, an uneven playing field with banks/non-banks, changes in regulation, regulatory constraints and how regulation keeps banks from being more innovative.
- Balancing new vs. old: This includes managing a bank's bread and butter core business with preparing for new future products and business, change readiness One attendee cited what she called the "Competency Trap," or the conflict between existing businesses and innovation team.
Other top challenges mentioned by attendees:
- Economic uncertainty
- Focus
- The complexity of the segmentation of business units
- Too much going on
- AI (3 mentions)
- New competitive business models
- Keeping up with new wave of integration (2 mentions)
- Rising costs
- Fragmented data sources/formats
- Unifying different product lines into a cohesive experience
- Understanding increasingly fragmented user base
- Diversifying and growing quickly while keeping quality up on existing solutions
- Moving to cloud
- Speed (3 mentions)
- Resources/other priorities
- Legacy tech
- Resourcing to grow
- A volatile bank market