The following op-ed was published in American Banker by Gaurav Verma, VP of Customer Success at HackerRank
It’s no secret that tech matters more and more to the banking industry.
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein calls the investment bank a tech company — and roughly 25% of its 33,000 employees are engineers. JPMorgan reportedly employs 50,000technology workers (including a former Google artificial intelligence executive), which is nearly double the total number of employees at Facebook. And Morgan Stanley recently announced the creation of a new executive role to lead the company’s tech transformation.
And it’s not just an arms race against giants. Regional and smaller banks must also invest in technology — and thus tech workers — to manage governance, risk and compliance.
But as banks search for tech employees to join their ranks, they’re competing against Silicon Valley giants like Google, which can make it tough to attract the best software developers. Part of the problem is that many financial institutions are still holding on to outdated thinking about how the job market for tech talent works. There are several harmful myths that make it harder for banks to recruit these employees that they need to banish if they want to make the transition to a tech-led operation.
