Finance Has An Image Problem

Nasir Zubairi, CEO of the LHoFT (Photo © LHoFT)

Financial Services needs a rebranding if Luxembourg is to attract the talent it needs on its home turf. CEO of the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology Nasir Zubairi explains.

Jess Bauldry: It is no secret that tech sectors like fintech are desperate for technology profiles. One of LHoFT’s strategic focuses is education. What triggered this focus?

Nasir Zubairi: I have two teenage boys and I have many friends with teenage children. And to some degree, I feel that education is far from fit for purpose in multiple ways. One being the element of me as an employer, in terms of the skill sets that I’m looking for. But more importantly, also maybe thinking a little bit into the future as to what skill sets are going to be important in the workforce. And I don’t necessarily think these are the skill sets that are being taught at schools.

On the flip side, I worry about the engagement for the current generation of students at school, simply because there has been very little reform of the schooling system over the past 20-30 years across Europe. The fact that there is not a single paper written by any medical professional […] that would argue anything but that our children have shorter and shorter attention spans. Even we have shorter attention spans than we used to have […] And then yet we expect them to sit in an exam at the age of 18, or 19 to sit their final exams and to use a pen and paper to write down a bunch of answers, without any assistance or aid to formulate those answers, I just find absolutely, genuinely ludicrous!

What kinds of technologies would you suggest they use?

There isn’t a time in our own lives now where we do not have a multitude of tools at our disposal to be able to craft what we’re trying to do. […] With the advent of ChatGPT I’m using that every day, even if it’s just to check that the stuff I’ve written has come out well. Ultimately, it can do the research part of my job within a fraction of the time that I can do it. If these are the tools that we have, I’d rather my children be taught to use these tools effectively. Some sort of foundational knowledge is important. But I’d rather they be taught how to fish rather than be taught what a fish is.

How do you see this benefiting the fintech sector, besides having greater market maturity for financial apps?

When I graduated from university 30 odd years ago, everyone I knew wanted to go and work in finance. It was seen as the job and as an exciting badge of honor. That is no longer the case. The best and the brightest do not come into financial services anymore. They go to Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, right and the Big Techs. Maybe they have aspirations of being entrepreneurs, which I find absolutely ridiculous. Entrepreneurship is not a career. Luxembourg as a country, in general and specifically in financial services, is therefore suffering. Luxembourg in itself relies very specifically on attracting foreign talent more than anything, and it is now increasingly becoming difficult to acquire good quality foreign talent, because the desire and demand to work in financial services, our core industry, is lacking. As well as a few other issues in terms of recruitment processes, etc.

Photo shows the LHoFT Fintech Recruits day at Belval in October 2022, aimed at attracting young talent to the financial services technology sector (Photo © LHoFT)

What solution is LHoFT proposing?

We put together a program which we’ve been running now for the past six months called FinTech Campus, where every week we bring in a cohort of students from universities across Europe, to showcase our ecosystem: the merits and the innovation and creativity that does actually exist in financial services. In that context, we leverage the technology angle, and showcase this is what’s happening today and this is where we try to make these students interested in wanting to potentially pursue careers [in financial technology services], which we hope adds value and creates value for the whole ecosystem. […]

The other gap that exists in our ecosystem is critically the traditional financial institutions and their knowledge about what is happening in technology, what capabilities are being seeded, what’s now the productivity that can be delivered? Where are the trends? What are the new technologies, the new types of companies that are coming to the fore and how that can benefit their business?

“The best and the brightest do not come into financial services anymore. They go to Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, right and the big Techs.”

Nasir Zubairi, CEO of the LHoFT

Where is the resistance to change coming from?

I would say it’s moved down a tier. Where [before] I think it was wholescale across traditional finance, now I think executives get it. I think now we’re dealing with the traditional barrier to change which is middle management. We’re trying to really hone in on them to show that it’s not actually technology that could help eradicate their job, it’s their resistance to technology which is more likely to eradicate their job. But also technology is there to deliver more productivity, to make that job more interesting because rather than them focusing on boring process-driven tasks, they can automate all of that and focus on more interesting, creative aspects of their job.

But will the adoption of technology create new jobs?

All the evidence suggests that automation in all of its guises throughout our entire history, ultimately ends up employing more people in any given industry, and that’s research conducted by a professor at University of Boston called James Besson. He looked at the entire history of industry across the US over the past 200 years. Every single industry ends up employing more people, you just do something slightly different.

The most obvious example within financial services was the introduction of the ATMs in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Up until then, if you wanted to withdraw cash, or do any sort of mundane banking, you went into the bank branch and you went to the bank teller. Everyone thought that’s the end of the bank teller. There are more bank tellers employed in the US than they ever have been in history. They just don’t do the same thing. And it’s probably a far more interesting job because the machine outside dispenses the money and does the mundane stuff.

Luxembourg finance minister Yuriko Backes is pictured with LHoFT CEO Nasir Zubairi cutting a cake at LHoFT’s fifth anniversary in July 2022 (Photo © Eric Devilled)

How is LHoFT targeting this cohort?

We have an incredibly large library of research and educational content on our YouTube channel. A lot of our education in this segment is delivered via webinars now, which we kicked off particularly with COVID and have continued. What it’s allowed us to do is to plug into the educators, i.e. specialists, senior executives with decades of experience from all over the world who come and provide their insights. What frustrated me when we first started doing this was the complete lack of bankers that were actually attending. And so we have tried to focus on how we build awareness and hook them into engaging with some of this educational content. That ultimately requires looking at it from an economic perspective where, for example, myself or Alex from the team will have a chat with the CEO of an organisation where there is resistance and say ‘let one of us come to your ‘town hall meeting’ for 10 minutes to talk about where the world is going and catalyze the fire so that people start thinking a little bit different’.

Another major initiative is for gender inclusion in fintech, which LHoFT launched on International Women’s Day in 2022. Can you tell us about the initial findings of the research that LHoFT did into gender diversity in fintech?

We conducted a number of events, panel discussions, focus groups, and desk research over this past year, trying to understand and get feedback to understand the issues related to creating more inclusivity for women. One of the big questions was ‘why aren’t women applying for jobs?’ We learned some interesting things like the fact that there is a masculine and a feminine tone of voice in job adverts, and that certain tones appeal more to one gender than the other. I found out there’s a whole bunch of applications that can study the tone of voice and tell you where you could improve it to be more neutral. […]

What then is the issue? We learned about the approach between men and women applying for jobs. A typical job advertisement is structured with the role, skills and experiences we look for. A man, in general, with notable exceptions, will apply for a job even if they only meet 60% or less of those skills or experiences required. A woman in general, with notable exceptions, will only apply for a job if she fulfills 100% of that criteria. There are some societal tailbacks on this and maybe a few other issues. […]

It has a lot to do with the rule-following that women have inbred into them or societal pressures that push them to be rule followers. It is why they study harder and must meet all the requirements. What that’s taught us is we need to look at a different way of doing job advertisements. I’m seeing some interesting tools, for example, which don’t focus on saying these are the skills you need, but using storytelling and pictures, a complete sort of 180° pivot on how you do a job advertisement. It is really quite creative. There’s a whole host of things we’ve looked at. We’re now putting all of that together in a research report, which we will publish with KPMG.

How are you implementing these learnings into the work at LHoFT?

We have already started to action one or two of those recommendations because I believe you’ve got to walk the talk and not just talk the talk.

So we’re beginning to already put in place some of these things but I’m not going to give too many hints on that because we’ll wait until the report is published to let the world know what we’re doing.

The stakes for not making fintech inclusive are presumably high for Luxembourg, a country which struggles to attract tech talent?

If we are struggling for talent, we should at the very least look on our own doorstep and see how we can better utilise that talent pool. Luxembourg has one of the most highly-educated adult populations and sadly the finance sector in particular is very male-dominated. You have a very highly educated set of women that are standing at high school gates picking up their children rather than being in the workforce. […] Some women may enjoy doing that while some men enjoy doing that. Maybe we can offer avenues for them and provide a more inclusive environment for them to be able to reintegrate into the workforce. So that’s a big part of why we’re focusing on this as well.

What is LHoFT doing for its community in the next year?

We have gone through a process since our five-year anniversary around the next phase or as we call it, LHoFT 2.0. One key element is the massive and razor sharp focus we have on promotions and events we’re doing on social media about the community. We go to events to promote our community. We have a large stand at ICT Spring for our community. It’s really about giving our community a platform for them to engage.

The second very big event that we are very excited about is the Singapore FinTech Festival in November, where we will be going with a very large delegation in partnership with Luxembourg For Finance. We want to show the traditional finance and financial institutions coming with us the scale of FinTech and where it’s going because this event is incredibly inspiring. And again, it’s about having a big Luxembourg stand that our community can leverage to be able to engage with peers and partners in Singapore.


This article was first published in the Silicon Luxembourg magazine. Get your copy.

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