As part of the Heard at Ops series, EY’s Stefanie Coleman shares her perspective on the potential impact of blockchain and AI in financial services and discusses the unique workforce challenges that firms are facing today. Watch the video and read the Q&A below.

Q. What will be the impact of blockchain and DLT on the industry?

The benefits and the vision around blockchain are really compelling if you think about how it can de-risk, how it creates operational efficiency, and how it can provide some data integrity by supporting a single source of truth.

But what is potentially a little more controversial is the extent to which some of those benefits are being realized today. And it is conceivable that the change management connected to blockchain implementations has been an area potentially underinvested.

The upskilling of people to engage with these technologies, to build a common understanding around what it’s capable of doing – the governance that is around blockchain technologies, the supporting processes, systems, and that ecosystem coming together – is going to be important to boosting the impact of these types of technology assets.

Q. How significant is the activity around AI?

We’re at the tip of an iceberg here, and I think we are going to see some radical disruption and innovation connected to generative AI and large language models and similar types of technologies. What’s interesting about that is we don’t know what we don’t know yet, which is both exciting and in some ways a bit frightening.

I think the opportunities are they’re going to be productivity boosters. I don’t see them strictly as productivity replacers. These tools are going to be used to help people be more productive in their job and create capacity to do different types of activity. And I think there’s work to be done to define what that new kind of activity is going to be.

Some of the risks are around ethics, ethical coding and making sure algorithms are not teaching themselves in a biased manner. And then also the kind of quality assurance and integrity of the output that’s coming out of some of these tools. It’s an exciting time and understanding these technologies and being part of the dialogue is a central part of that.

Q. What are the unique workforce challenges facing financial services?

If we expect to see more regulation affecting the sector, then operations professionals are going to need good risk and control professionals as part of their teams.

The other thing I will point out that is a little separate to the point on regulation is: we’re facing some rapid shifts in the socio-demographics of the workforce, particularly as it relates to generations – with a number of baby boomers either having retired or planning retirements in coming years.

And, we’ve got Generation Z, who are aged 13 through 26, making early career-level decisions now. Their life experiences and their expectations about work are different. And increasingly, we’re seeing a lot of banks really look to modernize the talent experience and appeal to that next generation of workers who are going to interact a little bit differently – and who are needed to help deliver the customer-centric experience that is now expected.

Stefanie Coleman is Principal, People Advisory Services, at EY

Watch the panel with Stefanie from SIFMA Ops 2023: 50 Years of Building a Foundation for the Future

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