By Ray Birch
TAMPA—As if fintechs didn’t present enough of a challenge already to credit unions, they now are creating another that one company is describing as a “viscous cycle” that must be addressed.
That challenge? Fintechs are hiring away a lot of the top IT talent while at the same time driving up the need for credit unions to hire more of these skilled individuals, according to Trellance.
“There’s a massive shortage of talent right now within credit unions,” said Karan Bhalla, chief growth officer at Trellance. “To put this in perspective, we looked at just the top 100 credit unions and found there were 6,000 vacancies. Now that’s just 100 credit unions among the more than 5,000 in the industry.”
But credit unions’ needs stretch beyond just filling open positions, emphasized Bhalla. There has been a growing need for people with skill to analyze the mountains of data credit unions are relying more on today to personalize their relationships with members and grow.
“Credit unions have evolved into far more data-heavy organizations. There's reskilling that's needed in the industry,” said Bhalla. “In the past you were probably mostly looking for tellers when you had a lot of open positions. But now you are looking for people who can help you compete.”
That competition is coming not only from big banks with deep pockets to leverage data, but from fintechs that have changed consumers’ expectations for service delivery.
Two Big Things
“There are two big things to pay attention to now,” said Bhalla. “The fintechs are eating up a lot of the talent. Fintechs are exciting places to work. They are getting into the financial services arena and they are game-changing.”
The other side of the hiring pressures CUs are feeling from the growth among fintechs is the need to partner with the tech startups to compete. Those partnerships, however, are driving the need to hire people with the skill to work with the new technology partners, Bhalla told CUToday.info.
“Especially smaller financial institutions--they are being asked to find and adopt more of these fintech partnerships that offer new, cutting-edge tools,” he said. “And with those needs come people that can work on those things, because partnering with a fintech is never a seamless integration. These credit unions that bring on fintechs need people with these skills. It's sort of a vicious cycle.”
‘Not Easily Handled’
Bhalla acknowledged the talent shortage, too, has been driven by the pandemic and the Great Resignation.
“The pandemic, as we know, also has driven greater use of technology by consumers,” Bhalla noted, adding cooperatives are leaning more on partners to help them fill this talent void. “This is not a problem easily handled by credit unions, especially the smaller ones. We just keep hearing a great deal from credit unions about the need for reskilling.”
As CUToday.info reported, Trellance recently opened a new office in Bangalore, India. The 30,000-square-foot space is expected to house 225 new employees within the next 12-18 months who will support the company’s recently launched Talent Services division.
According to the company, staff in Bangalore will possess a broad spectrum of the industry’s in-demand, high-tech skills such as cloud computing, programming, data engineering, data analyst, data scientist, core system developers, business intelligence, visual dashboarding, and system infrastructure.
As part of the Bangalore office, Trellance is launching a new concept called MyTalentCenter. Through MyTalentCenter, a credit union can establish offshore resources in a what the company calls a “highly-managed environment.” Trellance said it replicates a credit union’s tailored infrastructure and highly secure protocols, while providing a separate physical place for dedicated talent resources with 24/7 monitoring. MyTalentCenter services are flexible and scalable, Bhalla said.
Why Bangalore?
Bangalore, which is the capital the Indian state of Karnataka, is known for being global center for the information technology industry. More than 2,000 IT companies have a presence in Karnataka, including 87 global Fortune 500 companies.
Bhalla said Trellance is “going where the talent is” to help credit unions with their increasing need for data analytics resources.
“The chief reason we are opening the new office and expanding our staff significantly is to build out the technology talent force credit unions need so critically to be competitive today,” he said. “We are going to one of the global information technology centers of the world to recruit people with skills in cloud computing, programming, data engineering, data analytics, core systems, business intelligence, visual dashboarding and system infrastructure to help credit unions innovate with speed and scale.”
‘Transforming’ Workforce
Bhalla said that with remote work becoming the norm, credit unions themselves have tried to address the talent shortage by expanding their reach for people nationally.
“I think many have lifted some of their geography restrictions and are hiring outside of their traditional hiring spaces. But that not been enough, I think credit unions are finding,” stated Bhalla. “The entire workforce, in terms of numbers, is transforming. Over the next four to five you're probably losing and gaining 20% of your work force. That's a massive skill piece… I think credit unions will have a hard time keeping up with that themselves.”