The biggest challenges in finance training and how to overcome them
Limited time
Time is money in the finance industry, so asking your staff to step away from their desks to complete finance training is just not very feasible. This is especially true for those working on the trading floor of a bank where time away from their phone means revenue loss for them and the company.
You need to make sure your courses are short, engaging and flexible so that they can cater to the different shifts and time zones that everyone works in. Make them exciting by gamifying them. Oplift’s gamification solution offers staff 3 daily challenges which they can complete in a fun gaming format. These include whack-a-mole, catapult castle or a penalty shootout.
Endless regulatory compliance constraints
Because there are so many compliance constraints surrounding the financial services industry, it can mean that your finance training quickly becomes outdated. This is especially difficult when you have to keep thousands of employees up to date and informed. It becomes timely and costly trying to keep up and it can be disastrous if you don’t.
If you have an outdated training system, then every time a regulation changes it can be a really big job trying to overhaul everything. You need to make sure you have a system in place which allows you to edit communications whenever you want. You’ll need one which creates learning material from the communications you publish so that you don’t have to recreate everything twice. Make sure that you can quickly and easily alert all employees, use: posters, emails, phone calls, meetings, or alerts.
Not retaining information
Most financial firms have started to realise that results don’t really tell us much. Yes, you can see if an employee has retained the information that they are supposed to at that moment. But that is only half of the story. You need to know that the information is embedded so that they remember it at all times. In order to do this you will need to create:
Action planning documents – Do this by setting relevant tasks for your staff. Oplift allows you to create microlearning playlists for each module, within these you can set quick questions and tasks. An employee will only be able to mark the playlists complete when they have completed the tasks as well as the questions. This means they will always put their learning into action from their finance training.
Booster sessions – Quick learning to make sure that the information is retained. Do this weekly after the session. Gamification is a great way to do this without it becoming boring or tedious.
Training for employees to learn after the course. Create mini-modules of what your staff have learnt as a way to refresh their knowledge more regularly afterwards.
Handling the amount of risk management training that needs to be carried out
The amount of risk management training in the finance industry can be overwhelming. Whether it be an operational risk, liquidity risk, systematic risk, legal risk, or credit risk. Your staff need to be up to date on all of it. The best way to train employees is to do case-based learning. This is where you ask questions which are linked to real-world situations. You help them understand how the topic would come up in an everyday situation and what it would look like.
The amount of content that is needed for upselling in finance
Financial upsells are a lot more complex than other industries. This is because they are always very specific to each customer. You can’t just bolt on a few extras because it’s not a one size fits all approach.
For example, you may need to train employees about how to sell interest rate swaps to over 21-year-olds in their finance training. To tackle the sheer volume of scenarios for upselling you should profile as many of your customers as you can. Once you’ve done this you can begin to create a database of all the types of upsells that can be tailored to them. If you have a platform where staff can leave suggestions, you should ask staff to add any of their own suggestions. From here you can start creating questions and tasks related to the upsells to embed the knowledge. This will help employees remember them the next time they are speaking with a customer.
Oplift offers a searchable knowledgebase so staff can quickly filter whatever they need to find out. Its colourful tiles are used to organise anything and everything. Use them to create customer profile tiles for upselling, employees will quickly know where to look when they are talking to each customer.
If you are looking for a financial training solution which will speed up learning, make it easier and ensure it happens every day. Discover Oplift. Call us on +44 (0)1273 778289 or email us hi@oplift.io
