Snapshot – Project Services Recruitment Across Financial Services

Whilst the market is still buoyant, it has cooled somewhat over the last couple of months, not quite the same frenetic pace seen over the last 18 months.

The Royal Commission’s investigation across the financial services industry is still having a huge impact. The passing quarter has shown a continued demand for specialist skills in Risk, Regulatory and Compliance projects with a key focus being remediation.

In addition to the legislative mandates the market is continuing to undergo significant changes through restructures as results of mergers, acquisitions and divestments primarily across areas such as Insurance and Financial Advice in organisations such as CBA, Westpac/BT, ANZ/IOOF and TAL/Suncorp.

Major skills in demand

Generally speaking good project practitioners with strong Banking and Financial Services experience should be able to find work without an extensive search.

Business Analysts are in hot demand, notably Senior Business Analysts with any experience across Risk, Regulatory and Compliance, Remediation and Cyber Security.

Project practitioners with solid experience across Financial Planning, Life Insurance and Superannuation, are very well placed given all the market activity.

Watch this space

ASIC – 86 New Investigations

ASIC is already in the process of undertaking 86 new investigations with the major banks including the need to release internal reports on their governance and cultural failings ultimately generating more work for the banks.

Open Banking

Open Banking is a new standard being implemented. It defines how financial data should be created, shared and accessed. It’s a game changer and gives consumers the power to securely share their selected banking data with accredited third parties through application programming interfaces (APIs). Most institutions (tier 1 and tier 2) have established project teams for open banking however this will only gather momentum over the next couple of years.

Questions moving forward

With discretionary projects not always being prioritised, some sizeable programs have been de-scoped or completely lost funding. With funding being diverted to large remediation projects and corporate works, when will some of these discretionary projects and strategically important initiatives come back into play?

Whilst remediation projects aren’t going away for the moment, will there be a time soon when there is a flood of candidates re-entering the marketplace who have been engaged on these huge programs? Will this lead to a candidate surplus?