These are the new skills needed to succeed on Wall Street in 2020 and beyond as banking giants embrace the digital age, according to two execs at $2.7 trillion asset manager State Street
- Technology skills remain in high demand on Wall Street as banks look to adopt more digital tools - but another talent gap is emerging.
- As coding abilities become more commonplace among traders and other finance positions, Wall Street banks like State Street are seeing a demand for individuals with stronger soft skills like critical thinking and creative problem solving.
- It's one reason why music majors and other nontraditional backgrounds are of high interest, according to global head of algorithmic trading Nickolas Delikaris.
- Individuals with those degrees have "a very unique way of approaching a problem," added Jay Biancamano, who heads State Street's global digital product development and innovation team.
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BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS - Large US banks are spending heavily on their digital overhauls. But while a lack of tech talent remains a problem, there is another skills shortage that also threatens to blunt those innovation efforts.
Increasingly, finance backgrounds are no longer the only required skill for traders and other positions. Now, they must be experts - or at least proficient - in programming languages like python. It's a key focus of the multibillion dollar reskilling efforts underway across corporate America - and a major area of recruitment for human resources departments.
Companies like JPMorgan Chase and Citibank, for example, are putting more employees through coding boot camps.
And State Street - which manages assets for corporations, mutual funds, and other non-individual investors - is interviewing more people from Amazon and Facebook than Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, according to global head of algorithmic trading Nickolas Delikaris.
But as those skills become commonplace, one key differentiator is emerging that is more difficult to train: the ability to problem solve and collaborate in more diverse cohorts.
"Old traders all had the same skill set, and you were basically fighting with one another to go up the food chain," Delikaris told Business Insider. Now, "you're building teams with complementary skill sets."
State Street has a strong need for those new skills as it pivots to automation. The company has laid off thousands of workers - including 15% of its senior staff - as it adopts new digital capabilities across its operations.
Delikaris and Jay Biancamano, who heads the firm's global digital product development and innovation team, are the ones responsible for much of that drive. The two work closely together to figure out which projects to pursue and whether the initiatives are showing any early successes.
Music majors replacing finance degrees
For both teams, the digital push is creating a demand for more atypical backgrounds in the highly competitive finance industry, like music majors.
Those who graduate with such a degree have "a very unique way of approaching a problem" that helps the bank overcome a shortage in skilled labor in other areas, according to Biancamano.
"No company has all the talent that it needs to facilitate" a digital transformation, he said. "Even if they had the talent, they either don't have enough of it, or they don't have the right matching." He added that the only way to be nimble is to have a network that can adapt.
Those who take music theory courses, for example, learn how to pair basic notes together to create more complicated and compelling pieces. Such an education helps teach graduates the nontechnical skills State Street and other banks now expect, according to Delikaris.
"That's everything you think about in business," he said. "You've got a component that you have to understand at a broader level that gets you something very, very creative. But it's putting it all together, and then it's hammering home the implementation side of things."
The soft-skills gap
But it's not just music degrees that come out of college armed with those critical soft skills. Delikaris says one of the most successful members of his team is a history major - a background that a decade ago would have been very uncommon at a financial institution.
"The soft skills have become more important than the hard skills," he said. "Do I need somebody that knows finance and could break down a mortgage? No. I need somebody that could think and actually guess what we want to do" before being told.
And that mindset goes beyond just the financial sector. Among the soft skills lacking the most among applicants in the US are problem solving and critical thinking, according to the Society for Human Resource Management.
Companies and universities are taking unique approaches to teach their workers those abilities. Fayez Mohamood, the CEO of software firm Bluecore, makes his employees take improv classes. And Northeastern University requires its computer scientists to enroll in theater courses.
State Street runs a program called "the enumerators," where each year roughly 35 people are chosen to take courses on both technical subjects like coding, as well as soft-skill development.
The inspiration to start it came three years ago after the company sent all of its traders to coding academy.
"If you're a go-getter and want to start something and you get a little bit of a tipping point, the firm actually goes out of its way to try to reward that," Delikaris said. "It gives people a good feeling. They know if they put in some effort, they're going to get a reward - or at least the leash to try it."
