Students opting for careers in sales, investment banking, and trading – their numbers are on a decline; a meagre 3% of Harvard graduates opted for careers in the domain. 

The long working hours characteristic of the industry doesn’t help. Fresh graduates want to experience life, not to commit to wage slavery right out of school. Prominent industry personnel, however, are moving towards effecting changes in the present culture. Burnout looms dark and ominous, over the heads of junior bankers – and automation is the solution to take some of the work off of their shoulders. 

Several clients were experiencing the advantages of automation in other aspects of their businesses, driven mainly by conventional automation programs led by a center of excellence.  

However, an interesting trend has surfaced over the course of the previous year, with an increasing number of these organizations now empowering their staff to obtain the advantages of automation for themselves through big-scale, citizen driven, automation programs. 

Via citizen development programs, staff at these investment banking firms are being provided with the low-code tools and knowledge to begin developing automations for self-use and for their teams. These staff now have the capacity to apply the advantages of automation to the monotonous tasks they carry out everyday, giving them the space and time for higher value work. 

Advantages of citizen-driven automation 

There are several reasons why organizations are welcoming citizen development as an aspect of their automation strategy. 

To begin with, being reliant only on a COE to produce automations for staff can develop bottlenecks. In every business, there are countless monotonous tasks being performed by staff every day. 

Most of these easier tasks, however, will never be assigned priority by the COE and its resources. Therefore, there is the prospect for staff members to address these prospective automation avenues for themselves via citizen-driven automation. 

In many scenarios, customers have also identified the opportunity for business users to be able to swiftly alter workflows to meet demands of evolving business cases. For instance, it becomes tiresome to have junior bankers ask for workflow modifications each time they begin a new deal or project and need to include these new datasets into workflows. Citizen-driven automation gives the flexibility business users need to swiftly adapt to a plethora of evolving business cases. 

Lastly, many organizations are reaching out to citizen developers as a vital pillar in the labor force of the future. With an increasing number of digital natives coming into the labor force annually, access to low code/no code tools to improve productivity has become a set expectation in the workplace. 

Enhancing the staff experience 

For the aforementioned reasons, combined with their exhaustive workload, render junior bankers an ideal fit for citizen development. With the capability to develop automations for themselves (which can be achieved with Ui Path Studio X), front office teams scattered throughout industry are saving thousands of man hours spent on: 

• Delivering weekly trading updates 
• Developing pitch books for customer meetings 
• Delivering trading comps to customers 
• Developing public information books (PIBs) 
• Collating working group lists 
• Format of earnings models 

These use cases are indicative of a mere portion of the ways how junior bankers are utilizing UIPath, but the advantages of citizen-driven automation are paying off in several ways. Junior bankers are getting their time back, enabling them to concentrate on tasks of increased value that are customer facing, and experience improved collaboration with their teammates. All of these have a discernible influence on the staff experience and in enhancing their work-life balance. 

References 

https://www.uipath.com/blog/automation-improving-investment-banks-employee-experience