Dear Finance Professionals, Meet Your New Replacement

For anyone working in the lower rungs of the hierarchy in the financial services sector, there is a clear message right now: upskill fast to get promoted or maybe look at re-inventing yourself in another career.

For all the platitudes about how automation will free up humans to add value, the reality is that not every human will make it through to the other side of the automation revolution. And that revolution is happening fast. The first phase is likely to be done by mid this decade.

For example, research house Gartner forecasts that more than 40% of finance roles will be new or significantly reshaped by technology implementations by 2025.

Driving this will be automation, which will significantly impact the structure and composition of finance teams. According to Gartner, around 80% of finance leaders have implemented or are planning to implement robotic process automation (RPA). 

ROI case

There are compelling reasons why. Gartner says that RPA can save up to 25,000 hours annually and an average of USD878,000 per organization with 40 full-time accounting staff. It is low code, and the operations it can be applied to are banking’s low-hanging fruit.

In loan processing, for example, automation can cut costs by 70% and time by 80%. 

The RPA tools are much more accurate than humans, who can’t boast of an error rate close to 0%, as RPA tools can. This results in lower costs, faster processing, better compliance, and fewer customer complaints. 

The army of staff who have traditionally worked in transaction processing functions such as procure to pay (P2P) and order to cash (O2C) is forecast to be replaced by small teams of specialists focused on process excellence, data governance and application management.

RPA is having a similar impact on onboarding customers and trade finance.

“By 2025, 80% of new headcount growth in finance will be in new subfunctions rather than traditional accounting and FP&A, requiring new roles and structures”

Onboarding is traditionally one of the most painful operations in the banking sector and has become even more so. RPA presents a cost-effective and fast way of verifying customer identities and clearing the Know Your Customer processes which are now a part of everyday compliance. Importantly, it can also lessen customer pain. 

Trade finance is an area of banking that has been unmolested by change for decades, if not centuries. It is still built around the Letter of Credit, which dates from the Middle Ages. 

Today, it is part of the complexity of the modern global supply chain and ripe for innovation based on RPA, transforming the issuing, managing and execution of Letters of Credit and bringing it into the 21st century. 

A new house

Automation, of course, isn’t the only driver of change and doesn’t exist alone. For example, the momentum for cloud-native platforms across all areas of operations is giving RPA a new architecture to reside in. At the same time, composable and modular applications allow teams to pick off operational areas progressively at will. 

While all this will reduce headcounts in traditional functions, it will also open up opportunities – in IT. 

Anyone who hasn’t upskilled to be one of the specialists might consider swapping their career to finance IT because Gartner forecasts that these skills will be in big demand as organizations implement and transform. 

“CFO priorities for 2023 show us that transformation of their function remains very high on the agenda,” says Gartner’s Shannon Cole, a director in the finance practice. 

“By 2025, 80% of new headcount growth in finance will be in new subfunctions rather than traditional accounting and FP&A, requiring new roles and structures.”

Finance IT, says Gartner, is already one of the sector's most significant areas of headcount growth. 

The research house experts expect these roles to grow fivefold by 2025 to address the impact of composable business architecture on financial reporting compliance, data mining and management, and decision support coordination.


The outlook for talent is also tight, and supply and demand mean that remuneration could be attractive.

Even more reason for middle-rung bankers to think about upskilling soon and being on the right side of the RPA revolution.

Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their entire business models. You can reach him at [email protected].

Image credit: iStockphoto/Feodora Chiosea