I don't know how our management looks at it, but it seems to me that the situation is very serious. All the best people have either already left or are leaving in large numbers. What kind of place will this be after all the talented ones leave? My opinion is that this is a sure path to ruin.
8 replies (most recent on top)
The same could have been said around the recession in the early 1980s, layoff periods in the 90s, a few times in the 2000s, certainly before and after the so-called 'merger' (acquisition) in the late 2000s, and in recent years.
It is what you make it.
Senior talent was foolishly cut in the early years to save money, and now being cut as they are approaching retirement anyway, so they would be gone regardless.
A similar thing will happen in the next 5 or 10 years, and probably another 10 years, so it will look like it does now... junior people complaining with no clue, senior people leaving, junior people, now senior, asking what it will look like in the future, and the cycle continues.
@ath, well, I sure hope we don't suffer the AWS outages the geniuses at Amazon have recently. And you can see on this site that there is a whole lot of incompetence at Amazon...
Probably like BONY pre-merger.
Umm. …. Can you repeat that?
Comment above sounds like HR 😂😂 clearly no talent coming in but good try
Im assuming you work in some sort of corporate support function, likely ops or tech. I’m sure this group doesn’t want to hear this, but these functions aren’t what bank leadership at BNY is concerned about. Every bank feels the same way, and most other industries as well. Ops work is not a finance services-specific function.
The long term goal is to have very few people working in operations, for much of the rote, manual work to be automated, and for the ops professional of the future to be more of a data architect and process engineer than what the role is today, which is mostly executing on simple processes. This isn’t a grand conspiracy; this is the message communicated to the market and our investors, our board, our clients, and internally. Functions that support the businesses (ops, tech, control, etc), are seen as a drain on profits. At the end of the day, the organization will be seen to be as healthy as possible if operations can be correctly (or at least correct enough not to raise alarms with clients) executed in the cheapest possible manner. These are the best practices pitched by every business school, consulting firm, and in every board room in business.
The company doesn’t care about the talent in ops. They certainly care that the senior operations executives talent; that they have the organizational skills to keep their group running, understand the market environment so if the business wants to develop a new product, the ops organization can respond and build out new capabilities. What they don’t care about, however, is the talent sitting in the trenches and calculating NAVs, moving cash and securities around, settling trades, etc. This is the type of work that anyone can do with some training, and is also the type of work we are actively trying to eliminate. If these people are overworked and quit, it will either only speed up the digitization agenda, or the ops group will go out and hire anyone looking for a job to take the role, give them a little training on how to do the process, and let them run with it. The firm just truly doesn’t think about this, it’s replaceable labor to the company. I’m not saying that this is necessarily true in my opinion - I do think that it’s important that an ops and tech organization be motivated and not feel that their jobs aren’t secure or valued - but every industry sees their ops organizations as commoditized labor that does not need to be valued since their skill set is so replaceable. These firms are always different between back office and front office, for example Amazon has a terrible reputation among the distribution center workers and delivery drivers (in this case, their “ops” organization) but for product, engineering, and sales and client management roles at Amazon, the employees are very well taken care of with employee perks, high salaries, and rewarding work. This is the same dichotomy we have between our back office ops, tech, compliance, etc. roles and our product and client facing half of the company. The front office at BNY has it much better, the people like their jobs, they’re well compensated, and they aren’t laid off.
We have so much new talent coming in that it is not a worry. The new talent is so much better.
I agree. It is frightening how many good people have left. You just can’t replace experience. Then consider all of the system downgrades we have made. Like Oracle. It’s hilarious trying to get a bill paid.