Loraine Lawson 00:11
Hello, everyone, I’m deputy editor Loraine Lawson. And welcome to the buzz from bank automation news where we explore how automation and emerging technology are transforming the baking industry. This is our weekly wrap of what’s happening in the industry. First, I’d like to say thank you to our sponsor glia for your support. This week, I’m pleased to be joined by some kid editors Aaron marsh and Elijah Poindexter. It is January 14 2022. This week, Microsoft released its work trend index frontline worker addition survey, which queried 9600 frontline employees and managers including approximately 1200 Financial Services frontline employees and managers, and they did conduct like 15 minute interviews with these people. Overall, the study found that more than 40% of the global workforce is considering leaving their employer this month this year. banking and financial services industries employees were slightly more satisfied with their employers than those in other industries. According to Bill Burton, who is their Microsoft’s worldwide financial services head. They’re also optimistic about technology and what it brings to the job with two thirds of those surveyed saying they’re excited about workplace technology and technology ranked third on the list of factors that employers or employees say can reduce workplace stress behind better pay, and more vacation time, not not surprisingly. And 78% of financial services, frontline employees and managers also said they’ve been equipped with the right tools to do their job effectively. So what do we think we spent a decent range of ages here? Why do you think so many employees are wanting to shift jobs, especially frontline employees? And how do you think automation could help ease some of that?

Aaron Marsh 02:05
Stress? Well, I want to jump in on that Lorraine, because there’s a couple of things that strike me in this study, first of all, is its scope is pretty impressive. You’re talking about almost 10,000 people, right? They actually sat down and interviewed on this. So the scope of it tells you no till you’re like well, okay, this is possibly some very valid information to draw from it, but 40%. So what are we looking at two out of five people are thinking of bouncing at their job, they’re thinking of walking. And that’s a pretty big number, I think I would certainly take notice of that. If I’m an employer, maybe this is really a year to pay some extra attention to those, you know, to your best talent and make sure they don’t slip away. Right. That’s one takeaway. But, you know, also, it’s important that in the financial services industry, maybe it’s a little bit better than that, maybe it’s you, maybe it’s only 30%, maybe 35%, but there’s a little bit more satisfaction there. So that’s, that’s important to take from that too. I think, and I don’t know what you guys think. But, you know, during the pandemic, I think one of the things that has really awakened a number of employees is just the ability to work remotely, and people don’t value you know, and don’t necessarily fully appreciate what a difference that makes, I think it’s had a lot of employees, employees kind of take a second look at this. And they’re like, I’m not doing this anymore. You know, this is this is I’m gonna look for something different, I’m gonna look for something better. So I think that’s part of what you’re seeing.

Loraine Lawson 03:37
Build. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Alijah Poindexter 03:40
I said, I’ll just jump in here and say that I think this also shows that automation, you know, it’s not this iRobot thing where it’s some dystopian thing that’s gonna put people out of their jobs and, and ruin lives and permanently change things. If it permanently changes things, I think, from my estimation, and I think the survey backs it up, it would be for the better. Automation is a humanistic enterprise, that is something that is literally designed to make people’s jobs easier, and to, you know, bring more capital into the workforce to bring different and more differentiated job, you know, titles and, and duties into the workforce. And I think this shows that I think it shows that people are starting to realize that, you know, remote work was enabled by the pandemic, and that we move into all sorts of, you know, real time solutions, and, and my job is just become this much easier because of the solutions that 510 years ago, I would say that I would be out of a job, if any, if I encountered any of this in my appointment. Well, you fast forward to 2021 2022. It’s making people’s lives easier, and it’s making people’s jobs easier. And I think in the long run, quality of life, I think will certainly improve increase from this. So that’s just kind of my main takeaway. It’s just that people know what they want and what they want is automation. So if you’re not on that frontier, yet, if you’re not ready to dip your toes into the proverbial pond there as an employer as a business or as a financial institution, I would say get ready because people are going to start demanding it.

Aaron Marsh 05:04
And I want to hold on just one second, just one second, too, because Elijah, you raised such an excellent point. Because Lorraine, I know, you know, this, and I hate to I’m sorry to cut you off the, there is an inherent sort of worry that we’ve encountered before that is a sense that automation is going to take away my job, it’s going to it’s going to do my job. And then I’m going to be you know, sort of out, you know, downsize or whatever, and I’m going to be on the street. But I keep hearing this in from different angles. And it’s that automation is going to take away the busy work. Automation is going to take away the mundane tasks that are that are, you know, clamped, you know, kind of like clogging up my day. And all of a sudden those employees that you have can be repurposed in better ways. So, automation may not get rid of your job at all, it may actually is Elijah said, really improve it?

Loraine Lawson 05:52
Well, I hate to be the sour note, but that’s just my role in life. I will say, I think it depends on what field you’re in. I think that Bill burden said that he was impressed with financial services and how they had handled the pandemic with 90% of people working remotely and financial services, and markets. So that may be why those frontline workers were happier, they were able to work remotely versus someone at the grocery store, or McDonald’s or you know, a restaurant who couldn’t do their job remotely. And I think the same is probably true of technology. What we’re seeing in banking, and the financial services sector is that automation is taking away my mundane task and making people happier with their work. I’ve certainly talked with employees who were very happy with the results of automation and wanted more of it. But again, it depends on the industry. You know, there’s been a lot of automation in manufacturing that has put people out of work. It’s up in new jobs for robots and stuff. But of course, AI robots are very different, they’re more supportive, and friendlier. So Aaron, you also covered some studies this week, can you tell us a little bit about that? What was the main takeaway?

Aaron Marsh 07:01
I did. And first, a quick plug this is this is something new, that we’re launching, and we hope to do possibly like on a weekly basis, maybe on that, midweek that Wednesday point. And we’re calling this by the numbers, we get an awful lot of surveys and reports and studies and and other kinds of information like this, that unfortunately, a lot of it kind of slips through the cracks, we can’t always get to it. But we see some really neat takes and a lot of work and research done, you know, in the in the banking and financial service industries, many, many different ways to enter to gauge what’s going on there. So it’s really relevant stuff that we learn from it. So we’re going to take these things, and we’re going to roll them into this feature we’re calling by the numbers, we’re gonna actually kind of pull the most useful information from these and kind of serve it up to you nice and neat and, and deliver to you real quick and in kind of punchy headlines of things. So we’re hoping to do more of this. And it’s looking pretty good in this one in this first installment of it, I’m not going to get too much into what it was because I want you to read it’s a little bit self interested. But I’ll tell you what it was there was a there was a digital digital banking services study of about 2000 2000 customers by JP Morgan Chase, the United States, states his biggest bank. And so they took they took a look at 2000 consumers of digital banking and ask them what they’re doing with it, you know, how they feel about it. So there’s some really relevant takeaways there. I think you’d be surprised. We also heard from a couple of fintechs there’s LendIt, FinTech and, and forward AI. And they did they did some research looking at lending processes for small and small businesses in particular. And they found a couple of surprising things. Spoiler alert, there’s there’s a lot of room for improvement there. There are some things that can be improved. So take a look. And then lastly, there is a another, FinTech called tealium. And they their customer data platform provider. And they did they did this study that looks at how financial services, organizations and other other industries are using these platforms, what they’re doing with it is a couple of surprising things that are different at financial services organizations then in other industries and other fields. So certainly take a look check it out. It’s by the numbers. You see it on our site.

Loraine Lawson 09:30
Hopefully that will maybe help some people make a business case for investing in digital once they see those numbers because it’s a pretty strong reason to do that. Just that one finding. Elijah you reported on the daily pay. Yeah, they like pay, daily pay and what they were doing with sorry. digital wallet solution digital wallet My little document closed on me. So, yes, digital wallets. And can you explain what daily pay is? And how does the digital wallet give access to prepaid funds.

Alijah Poindexter 10:14
So daily pay is one of the I would say premier payroll fintechs. And what they specialize in is digital earned wage access solutions. And they do this for a bevy of businesses and institutions. And just as a quick, you know, primer on what earned wage access is, it allows people who are working in hourly roles, people who are working in jobs where the money that they receive on their paycheck is tabulated. According to the time they work rather than just a, you know, baseline paycheck. They are a digital provider of that. So essentially what they do is they partner with say, HCA healthcare one of their partners or Kroger, another partner, and they offer the employees of Kroger, if they choose to use it for 299 a pop, they can go into the daily pay platform and access their funds as they earn. So if you work an eight hour shift, you get paid $10 an hour, at the end of the shift, you pay 299 Go in there and you’ll have $80. Now what daily pay did that’s so interesting is that they leverage this into a digital wallet solution. So this digital wallet solution is it’s built on a data exchange network of over 6000 Financial endpoints. And this links employees, businesses and capital management partners. And then daily pay also utilizes machine learning techniques to you know, parse through bad data, perform anomaly detection. And then from this, they can determine what the what a user’s pay balance will be and how they can and cannot use this money, the daily walk or the daily pay digital wallet, what’s so cool about it and you know, my personal opinion is that it’s not just a traditional digital wallet where you go to your bank account, you manually transfer money over which may or may not include a hefty fee into the into the digital wallet, then you use that until the funds dry up and you wait for payday again, this combines both instant earned wage access with the ability the ability to pay for bills, pay for groceries to pay for gas to move funds around. That’s all part of it. That’s all part of it here. And it’s also built on a real time rail. It’s in conjunction with PNC Bank and the Clearing House. So it’s all real time. And I think it’s super interesting. And just to cap it off. I think it goes back to the point we were talking about a little bit earlier, which is that even for people in service roles and people who are working in, you know, these sort of hourly, you know, service and retail areas, there are still benefits to the to be reaped from automation. So it’s really interesting.

Loraine Lawson 13:48
Wow. That’s fascinating. Oh, next week we will be offered Martin Luther King Junior’s holiday, but we’ll be back Tuesday with earning weak coverage which already started this week with JP Morgan announcing they have a 20% increase in text Ben this coming year. Thank you so much for joining us for the weekly wrap on the buzz don’t forget to attend our big automation summit which is March 1 two second in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can learn more about the bank automation summit at Bank animation summit calm. For more podcast content, check out fake automation news.com and search the buzz from bank automation news on iTunes and Spotify.