Technology
08/08/2022

Where Banks Can Find Tech Talent

Even as the labor market cools, the need for tech talent remains particularly acute. The problem for banks is that they compete not just with other banks, credit unions and financial technology companies for data scientists, software engineers and product designers.

“The reality is, when we start talking about engineers, designers, product individuals, every company on the face of the planet is hiring those types of talents,” says Nathan Meyer, head of innovation strategy at $545 billion Truist Financial Corp.

That’s why Meyer and several other bankers are turning to the Georgia Fintech Academy, a unique program that trains college students across the University System of Georgia for technology jobs in financial services. Students in 26 institutions such as Georgia State, Georgia Tech and Kennesaw State, totaling 340,638 enrolled as of fall 2021, can work toward a certificate in financial services from a mix of nine undergrad courses and six graduate level courses. They might be majoring in computer science or business and taking those classes as electives. To complete the certification work, they need to finish three classes and complete an internship. The goal of the program is to help students find jobs in financial technology with employers across the nation.

Normally, Generation Z students don’t gravitate to a career at Truist, BankSouth in Greensboro, Georgia, or Ally Financial, all of which are involved in the program, says Tommy Marshall, executive director of the Georgia Fintech Academy. Nor have they heard of the fintechs that have used the program, such as core providers FIS, Fiserv, or U.S. Bancorp’s payment processor Elavon. “If you say Square or CashApp, they’ll say yes, or Venmo, they’re there,” he says.

Banks could improve their message to attract college students, says Meyer. “We’ve just started to do a better job around telling the story of banking, and helping students understand why it’s important,” he says.

And the need is great. Marshall estimates that bigger banks are hiring 800 to 1,000 people from college campuses every year for technology jobs. Meyer says that Charlotte, North Carolina-based Truist needs to hire hundreds of software engineers annually and adds that even the business side of banking needs people who have an understanding of technology, as well as people who can articulate the technology needs to upper management.

And it’s not just big banks that are hiring. Even community banks are looking for tech talent as they transform digitally. Kim Kirk, the chief operations officer for $2 billion Queensborough National Bank & Trust Co. in Louisville, Georgia, is looking for application program management and business intelligence folks. When she started working at the bank more than six years ago, a lot more employees performed mundane, clerical tasks. The bank’s business intelligence director now focuses on getting a better handle on customer information across the different departments and visualizing that data. “The talent you need is quite a bit different than what you needed maybe even five years ago,” Kirk says.

This fall, she hopes to work with Fintech Academy students on a way to use predictive analytics to foresee when a customer is going to close an account. “We really need a way to be able to get a 360-degree view of our customers,” she says.

Meyer, meanwhile, was interested to the program as a way to recruit racially and ethnically diverse prospects to Truist, so the bank’s employee base looks like the communities it serves. Truist has its heaviest branch concentration in the Southeast, following the consolidation of SunTrust Banks and BB&T Corp. in 2019, but it also crawls up the Eastern Seaboard into Washington, D.C., New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Marshall estimates that 71% of the students in the Fintech Academy belong to minority racial or ethnic groups and a third are women, due to the nature of the schools inside the Georgia university system. In its three years of operation, the Georgia Fintech Academy has placed 1,600 students in internships or jobs.

Although Marshall says other universities offer certificates in fintech, they’re mostly associated with graduate degrees or executive-level education, and won’t nearly meet the demand for talent. Outside of Georgia, the Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship in London has noncredit courses, and Duke University, The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University all have programs.

“There’s no other school system in the United States of America doing anything like what we’re doing now,” asserts Marshall.

Bank Director magazine’s third quarter 2022 issue has an additional article for subscribers on what banks are doing to attract and retain technology talent.

WRITTEN BY

Naomi Snyder

Editor-in-Chief

Editor-in-Chief Naomi Snyder is in charge of the editorial coverage at Bank Director. She oversees the magazine and the editorial team’s efforts on the Bank Director website, newsletter and special projects. She has more than two decades of experience in business journalism and spent 15 years as a newspaper reporter. She has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan.