Technological Modernisation Mindset: A Critical Skillset for Traditional Bankers

Sebastien Poirier, Director, Third‘Party Management, UNI Financial

Sebastien Poirier, Director, Third‘Party Management, UNI Financial

Lessons Learned by A Traditional Banker

Canada's financial institutions must and are eager to rapidly adapt to an unprecedented technological modernization that will continue to accelerate to keep pace with consumer expectations and regulations in an increasingly digital and borderless world. 

The list of innovations is long; just think of the modernization of payment systems in Canada, blockchain & crypto, digital currency, open banking, artificial intelligence, and so on. All these innovations, and their different versions, evolutions, and upgrades, are already having a significant impact on both financial institutions and traditional bankers.

Unless they adapt, morph, and innovate, financial institutions and traditional bankers will be outdated. I'd even go so far as to say that you'd better hurry up! it will be hard to make up for lost time and not keeping up with the latest innovation will set you an expiry date, and it may be closer than you think.

Today, I thought I'd share my reality with you of the traditional banker who has the good fortune and opportunity to navigate the many aspects of the banking industry: commercial, personal and mortgage credit advisor, advisor in business recovery for borrowers at risk, chief compliance officer of the first federally regulated credit union in Canada, third party management and recently take on the challenge of setting up a team structure to understand and manage the payments ecosystem.

Like my father, who was also a banker for 30 years, I started with the 9 to 5 days, happy hours and dinners with customers, taking messages in the morning, going on vacation for two weeks and being able to catch up within a few days. Let's just say that this era has been somewhat shaken in recent years with the rise of technological innovations and accelerated by the pandemic.

Let’s leave technology and modernization possibilities to the more qualified experts whom I respect enormously. However, my piece of advice would be, don’t forget about the importance of the mindset.

"An open mindset will help you solve situations with your team with a different approach and a more holistic view in a creative and stimulating environment where the best ideas will take precedence over politics"

The truth is, going from being an expert in a field that people consult for alignments to reinventing myself and learning to work differently has been my biggest challenge. I have been lucky enough to have several roles and gone through transformations, some with success and others with certain challenges. The lesson I learned the hard way as a traditional banker is to remember that all start between the ears, and the successful old recipes don't necessarily work as well in this fast-paced technology banking as they did in the past. Probably because, in this new world, you need to add several areas of expertise around the table to be able to fully understand the scope of the issues and guide employees.

Where to start? I'd say it's to accept that you're no longer necessarily the person with the most knowledge around the table, especially at the technical and technological levels. And that you cannot understand everything. You probably have a lot of expertise on how business processes work and why things work that you can share and that is still, and always will be, relevant. However, going forward, you need to listen to and have the technical and technological aspects explained to you and make sure you have highly technical and qualified people on your side, such as your enterprise architects, network architects, integration architects, security architects, optimization architects, etc.

To conclude, an open mindset will help you solve situations with your team with a different approach and a more holistic view in a creative and stimulating environment where the best ideas will take precedence over politics.

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