Everything is moving faster these days: new services, new ways of communicating and new technologies are emerging within a matter of months. To stay ahead, banks need to offer these new technologies to customers, who often use them every day in their personal lives. For example, banks need to offer richer and more secure online services, the ability to contact representatives by e-mail or chat, and mobile applications to access bank accounts or transfer money. New jobs have emerged to carry out these projects. Agile coaches are helping teams work in “agile mode”, combining collaboration and repetition. Scrum masters are bringing these new ways of working right into the teams themselves. And data scientists are making sense to collected data.
Agile Coaches: guiding companies on the path to agility
Adapting to and taking advantage of rapid change requires a tremendous amount of agility. In other words, banks need to continually make the services they offer more innovative, anticipate future trends, give rise to a culture of collaboration both internally and externally, etc. This means banks must reorganize, form cross-functional teams, quickly set up and launch collaborative projects, involve their employees in all these developments and, most of all, put clients at the heart of everything they do by prioritizing service and product quality above all else.
How can banks bring about this revolution? With an agile coach who supports the organization in its transition towards greater agility.
Agile coaches must know how to:
- Adapt to the needs of the organizations they assist, since their roles vary based on these needs, as well as the maturity of the team and the business
- Serve not only as a guide, but also as a training specialist or adviser at times
- Act as a consultant, support the team and then step aside once the transformation is complete—the job is temporary!
But while agile coaches act on the organizational level, it’s also important to bring these new ways of working to the teams themselves. That’s where the scrum master comes in.
Scrum Masters: agility in practice and continuous improvement
“Scrum” is the name of an agile development method developed primarily for IT projects. Rugby fans will recognize the word “scrum,” which illustrates the need to work together, and to always be ready to reorient the project with a fresh start.
In line with the principles of agility, the Scrum method is based on the rapid delivery of a prototype, which is evaluated by users and updated in successive versions that offer modifications and extra features.
Though sometimes confused with each other, scrum masters and agile coaches play very different roles. While the coach acts more as a “guide,” the scrum master is more of a “facilitator”. Unlike the agile coach who acts as a consultant and is not a permanent team member, the scrum master is a member of the project team who ensures the methodology is applied correctly and helps the team become autonomous. Finally, the agile coach steps aside once agility is achieved, while the scrum master operates on a continuous basis. The position focuses on a drive for continuous improvement.
To carry out projects and practice continuous improvement in line with the actual expectations of consumers, project teams have a distinct advantage in terms of new information providing better insight into the market. They owe this insight to the data scientist—the new “data master”!
Data Scientist: making sense of data to benefit the business
These raw and unstructured data, coming from multiple sources and collected using a big data approach, are unusable.
That’s why Data scientists give meaning to the data by structuring them, analyzing them to find correlations, and identifying recurring patterns, trends and typical behaviors to anticipate evolutions in customer expectations.Experts in statistics, math and computer science, data scientists collaborate with the various business sectors: marketing, IT, sales, etc. They work to understand the issues those sectors face to help them make the best decisions and overcome their challenges by extracting meaning from the data collected.
As new technologies and market expectations arise, new jobs and skills are already emerging within the banking ecosystem. Connected object and blockchain specialists, ergonomics experts, geomaticians: these experts will soon join the bank’s payroll, while some already work for “Fintechs”—startups specialized in the financial world BNP Paribas have teamed up to boost their innovation capacity and meet the expectations of its customers.