The skills you need for a career in financial services operations

So, you want to work in financial services operations. It’s an interesting choice – back-office functions like operations are typically less prestigious and well-paid than front-office ones like sales & trading, or even middle-office ones like compliance. Despite that, it's still a career that can put you in charge of thousands of people and hundreds of millions in budgets. But what do you need to make it big in the world of operations?

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For one, operations professionals need to have strong product and industry knowledge to facilitate transactions and address any processing problems – both in their own domain and outside it.

“People join the bank and learn a very narrow area, as if you were looking into a big castle through a keyhole in the door,” said Pawel Jemiol on the Evolution Exchange Finance Podcast with Gemma Thomson in May this year. Jemiol was head of operations for Nordic bank Nordea until earlier this year. “You only see a very, very tiny part," he explained.

Expanding your horizons and learning the wider picture is critical to climbing up the ladder, Jemiol said. “Without that, I think you are not getting anywhere forward, and that is probably one of the most important learnings that I've had in my career."

You’ll also need to be a strong communicator. Operations professionals deal with everyone from traders to auditors to investment bankers and need to describe complex processes in simple terms. They also deal extensively with other control functions, including compliance, credit, risk, and technology. Operations is a “very people-oriented aspect,” Jemiol said, “because you work with big number of people, big number of internal [and] external stakeholders."

Technical skills are also a critical part of the operations skillset: operational processes are now controlled by complex technology systems and even if you’re not coding these systems yourself, you’ll need to understand them.

Increasingly, that means a strong use of AI skills. AI is being heavily integrated in operations functions, with such people as JPMorgan’s CFO, Jeremy Barnum, telling the bank’s managers to “resist headcount growth where possible” and to focus on efficiency. Being able to utilize that efficiency as an operations person is very important and will only grow in importance.

For the time being, however, there are issues with AI integration. Jemiol said he doesn’t believe a “fully financially profitable model” for AI exists, even with huge market pressure to integrate it. As such, even if the job changes fundamentally over the next few years, those who are aware of and can integrate themselves with future changes now are best placed to grow in that future world. “Many activities we do today in banking will disappear,” Jemiol said. “Many others will appear.”

Operations careers can progress along several different paths. Many operations professionals find that they are called upon to broaden the scope of their activities as they progress. Others become specialists in a particular aspect of the operations process like settlement, clearance or project management. Some move into the front office in areas like sales and trading (although this can be a tough move to make, so don’t count on it happening).

Being eager to learn the wider picture, as we mentioned earlier, is key. Operations can be deeply siloed, with five roles sitting next to each other physically having next to no overlap. “If you take any five roles within big operation unit, those people probably have never met each other,” Jemiol said. “They use totally different tools. They might serve a totally different subset of customers."

Being aware of those other people is important as you rise up the ranks – you will become responsible for them too. "My first management assignment was team of five people,” Jemiol said, “then later it turned into 14, then into 60 or 90, then it was 130, then it turned into 300. The next role was 600, and then it turned into 3,000."

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