These are all recent job postings from Monzo. Let’s guess what is Monzo. It is the fastest growing bank in the UK. It is digital, mobile-only – meaning it has no branches, runs as an app, has 350+ people and is looking to expand internationally. Also, it is a recent unicorn (valuation of more than USD 1 billion) having raised more than USD 100 million for its product and geographic expansion. And it has been started by 33-year old British lawyer 3 years back.

The reason I mention Monzo is to highlight the changed face of banking and therefore, the changed description of jobs now available in a bank. Move over MBAs, Chartered Accountants and Chartered Financial Analysts. Future bankers need a new set of skills including the ability to code, to operate large datasets, scale rapidly worldwide while having the mindset to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams with diverse cultures and skillsets in a global workforce.

If you want to dismiss this as a one-off case, the rise of other similar banks like Revolut, Starling Bank and Atom Bank suggests that this is a trend that is here to stay and is likely to fundamentally change banking. The Virgin group, a GBP 5.5 billion conglomerate, is also investing heavily in a similar bank called Virgin Money, to be launched in 2019.

A McKinsey report on “The transformative power of automation in banking” highlighted a number of use cases for automation in the industry – JPMorgan using bots to respond to internal IT requests, Fukoku Mutual Life of Japan using IBM’s Watson (AI program) to settle insurance claims and ANZ automating mortgage payments process and semi-annual audit report generation. It expects that 10-25% of the jobs in a bank will become automated in the next 10 years while the employees would focus on more value-added roles.

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All these examples clearly showcase that traditional roles in the banking segment are under threat and anyone not willing to build a new set of skills that include the ability to think critically, communicate and work collaboratively with teams transcending cultural and functional differences is going to find himself redundant very soon.