In-demand Financial Services and Banking skills

Whenever you’re hiring for your teams, you want to ensure you are getting the right people who possess the financial services and banking skills your business needs. This is doubly important when there is a skills shortage in many global locations.

From a professional’s perspective, it’s beneficial to be aware of the specific banking skills that employers place a high value on. If you can upskill and increase your knowledge of those areas, then you will be strengthening your career prospects - both in your current role and if you’re looking to change jobs.

As part of our new salary guide, we identified some of the most important skill sets that employers look for when hiring into their Banking & Financial Services teams.

Broad banking skills in demand:

Investment Analysis

Investment analysis helps a business properly evaluate investments, taking into consideration industry trends and economic cycles. It allows you to identify opportunities, anticipate future performance, and help shape your portfolio management strategy.

Wealth & Portfolio Management

Wealth management is the provision of a range of services catering to the management of a company’s overall finances. Portfolio management is the full suite of identifying and adding new assets, as well as managing and rebalancing current assets, in an investment portfolio.

Regulatory knowledge

With regulations changing so frequently and the significant fines for not being compliant, up-to-date regulatory knowledge is vital for ensuring compliance and protecting a business.

Data Analytics

Banking and financial institutions are increasingly reliant on data to drive decision-making, making data analytics expertise highly sought after. Being proficient in using data analysis tools like Excel, Python, and R to extract meaningful insights from complex financial data is important.

Investment banking skills:

Capital Markets

Experience in capital markets means exposure to a financial market in which long-term debt or equity-backed securities, such as stocks, bonds, currencies, and other financial assets, are bought and sold.

Mergers & Acquisitions

When the ownership of a company or its operating units is transferred to another organisation, it is a merger and acquisition process. Having experience in this area of finance is attractive as you will have facilitated the restructuring of an organisation.

Risk Assessment

Assessing and managing financial risk is a critical function of banking and financial institutions. Expertise in risk assessment involves identifying, analysing, and evaluating financial risks, such as credit risk, market risk, and operational risk.

Quantitative Analysis and Coding

Quantitative analysis skills allow a professional to use mathematical and statistical modelling, research, and measurement in order to understand behaviours. On the other hand, quantitative coding is the categorisation of non-numerical data and assigning them numerical codes.

Skills for key areas of Operations:

Loan Operations

Being involved in loan operations will give you experience in ensuring the accurate and timely operations of a bank or other financial institution’s loan process. It’s an integral part of the revenue for a banking system, so being able to make optimisations and improvements can be hugely valuable.

Global Market Operations

Professionals working in global market operations are often supported by dedicated research functions to handle worldwide sales and trading activities on the primary and secondary markets.

Cash Management Operations

Also known as treasury management, cash management is the collection and management of cash flows from a company’s activities. It’s an integral part of ensuring an organisation’s financial stability.

Digitization & Automation

Strong technical skills are essential for a wide range of banking and financial services roles. The ability to communicate complex financial data effectively is quite critical. Expertise in data visualisation tools like Tableau, Power BI, and QlikView is valuable for creating dashboards, charts, and graphs that facilitate data exploration, pattern recognition, and informed decision-making.

Interpersonal, soft skills

As well as the more technical Financial Services and Banking skills outlined above, there are a few key interpersonal, soft skills that will help improve an individual’s success.

• Project management
• System enhancement / IT Skills
• Self-starter, collaborative
• Process improvement
• Being bilingual

If you are looking to hire someone in Banking & Financial Services, get in touch today.

Equally, if you are a professional in this area and are looking for your next career move, we have a range of jobs available - you can browse them here.