Amid Staffing Woes - Financial Institutions Must Automate To Innovate

More than 47 million workers quit their jobs last year amid the Great Resignation, many seeking out roles that align with newfound employee expectations. The ongoing labor crisis is hitting financial institutions particularly hard – 4 out of 5 financial institutions are worried about staffing shortages, according to the Financial Brand. Financial institutions that find themselves with fewer skilled IT employees on deck due to the Great Resignation face the risk of falling behind pace with the innovation demanded by members and employees.  

A workload automation and orchestration (WLA&O) strategy triggers the reallocation of existing IT talent to focus on the most value-driven initiatives, helping financial institutions reduce IT’s intervention in monotonous and time-intensive tasks. Beyond batch scheduling and self-service workflows, WLA&O can extend past core IT processes to include lights-out processing, ETL and data warehouse automation, and document imaging and storage, amongst a growing list of use cases outside the core.

Many financial institutions turning to WLA&O still need assistance implementing, managing, and optimizing their software to execute on. Managed automation services (MAS) provide the key to highly successful automation execution amidst the Great Resignation. MAS is an added layer of support available to financial institutions that already rely on automation software, deploying a third-party team of automation engineers who can assist with managing automated systems.

Automation experts

Especially for a financial institution with complex IT infrastructure, a third-party MAS team adds an additional layer of support with the help of automation engineers who can assist with the automation, monitoring, and management of automated systems. MAS helps to optimize the processes and run incident responses by building error logic into and across operations, supporting consultation, monitoring and maintenance, and operational support. 

A qualified MAS team can distinguish between the need for automation management and understanding the specific needs of a financial institution – two totally different things. MAS experts offer insight that can uncover new automation opportunities for a single project or across the entire organization.

How it works

MAS enhances the power of workload automation and orchestration software through the guidance of engineers who know the platform better than anyone. Experts will work with a financial institution to figure out which processes can benefit from automation and how those initiatives can be incorporated into an existing IT environment. Then, that engineer will maintain the automation efforts in accordance with goals and defined success metrics. Accounting for varying levels of need, a tiered MAS program can give an institution the specific amount of support it needs. Some areas MAS can be utilized include:

• Implementing complex digital infrastructures 
• Accomplishing lights-out processing at all hours 
• Boosting security and compliance while achieving the highest form of efficiency 
• Simplifying data management and extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes while lowering the chance of errors and time spent on troubleshooting systems

Keep IT focused on innovation

There’s never been a better time for financial institutions to benefit from all that automation has to offer. Market awareness of automation across financial institutions is growing, particularly amid resource scarcity. Financial institution workload automation and orchestration is widely understood to cut costs and bolster efficiency, but the most valuable advantage during the Great Resignation is resource reallocation.