How Returners can address the FinTech skills gaps and increase diversity
As the FinTech sector in Scotland is rapidly growing there is the need to consider a variety of talent pools in order to fill the skills gaps. Women Returners, the UK experts in enabling the return to work of highly-qualified professional women after an extended career break, has received Scottish Government funding to manage a cross-company returner programme within FinTech for employers in Scotland.
Hazel Little, Coaching and Programme Manager, Women Returners says “This is an excellent cost-effective opportunity for FinTech companies to address skills gaps and increase diversity with gender, age and experience. Returners are a relatively untapped talent pool that bring a wealth of professional experience, maturity and knowledge to the business.”
The Returners to Business Services Scotland Programme follows the success of the Returners to Financial Services Scotland Programme which was launched earlier this year in partnership with 12 leading financial companies including RBS, Standard life, Prudential, TSB and CYBG. All participating companies have reported that the programme has been a success for their business and over 75% of the returners have been offered ongoing roles, a testament to the high calibre of talent on the programme.
About the programme
The Returners to Business Services Scotland programme will enable Scottish employers to access and support 1-5 returning professionals in Edinburgh and/or Glasgow in a highly cost-effective way. Employers will be within business services including fintech, financial, legal and consultancy. The placement will run for 16 weeks, November 2018 to February 2019, and will be driven by employers’ recruitment needs.
Women Returners will provide employers with expert consultation, best practice guidance, promotional and manager support, including a returnship toolkit, programme advertising and line manager training. Returners will receive Career Returners Coaching Programme through four group workshops. The full cost of this is covered by the government funding.
Participating employers will provide CV worthy work (either a project or BAU role) and an internal buddy and mentor and will pay the returner salary at a professional level. There will be a good possibility of permanent employment at the end of the programme.
The business benefits
Employers will be able to tap into the wealth of returner talent in Scotland. The Returners to Financial Services Programme received over 450 applications with many employers hiring additional returners based on the high calibre of talent that they met with during the recruitment process.
Employers can increase diversity (age/gender/experience). This programme, which is aimed at professional women, enables employers to target business areas where they would like increased diversity. The previous programme filled several placements within IT, an area which is notoriously difficult to attract women.
Refill the female talent pipeline and improve the gender pay gap. Bringing experienced women back in at a level in line with their experience helps to build the female talent pipeline at professional levels and to address the gender pay gap.
Fortnightly Fintech Fuse – Fintech Fever Pitch!
Fintech fever has certainly ranked alongside the football world cup excitement and the beautiful summer over the last few weeks, with a huge amount of activity on Scotland’s fintech pitch’.
The combination of fintech firms, the world cup and a lovely sunny afternoon were brought together a couple of weeks ago when we had an informal fintech practitioners meet up to watch the Brazil verses Costa Rica match at the Peartree.
Great to see many of the community join us, with the conversation more focused around fintech opportunities rather than the action on the big screen!
Ray Bugg, the terrific leader of Digit, and I agreed that it was more exciting to hear our diverse range of fintech friends, such as Orca Money, Money Matix and Agrud, share their stories with each other rather than the action on the big screen.
We were of course cheering for the Brazilian team because, as many of you know, they are twinned with the Scottish Brazil in Blue team’ Cowdenbeath FC, from the Kingdom of Fife!
Fife FinTech
Of course, I would argue that Fife is more famous for fintech than football and it was fantastic to see the growth in region noted by the recent City UK report, highlighting it as one of Scotland’s key fintech clusters along with Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Looking forward, this growth has every prospect of continuing with firms such as Revovite Technologies expanding and the economic leadership in the region by people such as Iain Shirlaw with the focus on developing the talent pipeline through a fintech academy.
Developing fintech skills is a key priority and it was valuable to catch up with Gbenga Ibikunle from University of Edinburgh to help with the plans for a new unique degree in Fintech leadership to be launched soon.
Very excited about this development along with the launch by Napier University of their postgraduate fintech degree course
Together with the fantastic leadership by David Steinburg at various universities in ensuring we bring through the human dimension of fintech skills development, I am really optimistic we can work towards building the knowledge and skills for a successful global fintech centre.
Melrose FinTech
The various fintech skill development programmes will ensure we are well placed to support the growth across all parts of the country.
The importance of this was highlighted when I met up with the fantastic Andy Smith and Jason Forsyth of Melrose based fintech Agenor Iceflo to hear about how they have successfully taken their fintech proposition to the Middle East.
Hugely excited about supporting the team develop take their proposition in other parts of the financial services sector and global markets working with strategic partners IBM, Deloitte and Sopra Steria.
I’m very much looking forward to my trip down to the Borders to meet the whole Agenor Iceflo team in Melrose and developing the collaboration opportunities with the team at Vivolution, FinTech Scotland’s commercial partner in supporting fintech enterprise growth.
Working with specialist business consultants such as Vivolution is critical to supporting fintech firms maximise their opportunities in Scotland and internationally.
I do believe this will be a key strength going forward especially when I hear about the great work by people such as Alisdair Gunn at Framewire, Carey and Mark at Proposition Builder, Eddie Curran at CBS Consulting and David Reid at Because Brand Matter all supporting young developing firms to get to the next stage of growth.
This week I’ve also really enjoyed catching up with Sharon Ritchie and Lorraine Politi of Catax who very much complement the range of business consultants supporting fintech growth.
Furthermore, my recent catch ups with Susan Staiao and Pam Reid of Ekosgen on their research into the need for specific fintech environment has certainly emphasized the need find more effective ways to connect up fintechs with the right support
Leith and Linlithgow FinTech
This all reinforces the key role of Fintech Scotland in connecting up the various players in the fintech ecosystem so collaboration becomes a big driver of growth and innovation.
To this point, it was really motivating to meet with Catherine Bell, Managing Director of Leith based Mearns & Co to hear about their terrific ground breaking fintech innovation called Lightbox and discuss the various collaboration opportunities
As a further example, I had a fabulous catch up with the inspiring Stephen Marshall to talk about the exciting developments with his fintech business Insure Apps and connecting into the vibrant ecosystem.
I’m delighted I was able to connect Stephen with fellow Linlithgow residents Neil Cunningham and Robert McKechnie from our strategic partner Equifax to explore the mutual opportunities.
Bringing alive these collaboration examples is an exciting part of what we do and so it is super to be working with the brilliant Rory Archibald of Visit Scotland for the Innovate the Nation event in Stirling for September where we can share more.
Over this last couple of weeks I’ve also had great conversations with Paul Mosson of the Law Society of Scotland as well as Firas Khnaisser and Rachel Aldigheri of the Marketing Association on how we develop lateral collaboration to bring the fintech opportunities to wider communities.
Greenside and Gogarburn Fintech
A couple of weeks ago there was an opportunity to take a step back from the fever pitch of fintech activity and take stock on how far we had progressed since the start of the year at the first ever FinTech Scotland board meeting.
Hosted by the wonderful Nucleus Financial people at their Greenside offices and chaired masterfully by David Fergusson we had a very constructive Board discussion on what had been achieved to date and the priorities going forward.
I must admit I was a little bit nervous beforehand in bringing together such a diverse set of very successful leaders around the Board table, all with strong views on the potential for fintech in Scotland.
However, everybody gelled and after couple of hours of terrific engagement I was certainly enthused about realizing our ambition of becoming a leading global fintech centre. Thank you to the Board members for the collective endorsement and support.
This was then translated a few days later through the SFE Fintech Development Group meeting held at the RBS Gogarburn conference centre.
This meeting really got focused on how we execute the details of the FinTech Scotland plan over the coming months and was hosted chaired by Graeme Jones and Louise Smith.
Thank you to everyone who came along from the broad range of players across the ecosystem as well as to Janine Stewart and Murdo Connochie for making things happen on the day.
The early follow up conversations are very encouraging on progressing the various fintech opportunities, for example, meeting with Anurag Agrawi of Baillie Gifford at their Greenside offices and talking with Adam Pollock from RBS.
Dundee and Dunoon Running
I had the opportunity to reflect on the fever pitch of fintech activity when I was interviewed by Rob McLaren of the Dundee Courier, sometimes it is only when you take a step back and explain to someone what is going on that the scale of exciting activity becomes clear.
The opportunity to step back is one of the reasons I love my running to reflect on everything that is happening in the fintech community although my participation in the Dundee half marathon last Sunday was of less interest to Rob than the world of fintech!!
For me you can’t separate the important links between the two, I’m sure people like David Steinburg and many others will testify to this!
For example, my next race is a trip to the birthplace of fintech, the Kingdom of Fife for the famous Aberdour Donkey Brae seven mile race a week on Sunday.
This will be followed six days later by the Dunoon half marathon where I am hoping to come across some signs of fintech fever in this beautiful part of West Scotland! More on this next time.
Growing your Own ”“ the natural antidote to the Data Talent Shortage
This article was written by Robin Huggins, Director of Academy & Client Services for MBN Solutions
Following the success of 2016/17’s Data Lab MSc Placement Programme, the challenge for us was simple: How to deliver “Bigger & Better” results.
2017’s Programme increased in size and complexity with student and participating University numbers growing.
Last year’s results were spectacular ”“ almost 50 students placed into dissertation-worthy Industrial Placements with Scottish organisations. Over 75% of these students immediately securing permanent roles with their summer “host company” or similar Scottish organisations.
How do we improve on that?
The process began late in 2017 with a team from MBN Solutions visiting each of the participating MSc. courses to deliver Employability training under our MBN Academy #MBNSkills banner.
We’ve been working with students for a number of years now so are well versed in delivering a balance of factual and fun based activities designed to achieve one objective: Improve the soft skills, domain expertise and Employability prospects of each student we engage with.
Following our tour of the campuses of Scotland we then worked on an individual basis with students to understand their Placement preferences.
Then, we moved on to the tiny matter of generating enough projects for this group of students to be placed into.
Did we mention there were over 100 Data Lab funded students this year?
Ok, a considerable amount of these students indicated that they’d be more interested in University-based projects, but that still left a large number ”“ based on projections from last year’s Programme – we estimated at least 70 would require an Industrial Placement. How this was to be achieved was a combination of inspiration, perspiration and, to be frank, some desperation!
It’s “hats off” time, now ”“ and we’d like to thank the amazing organisations that we’ve been privileged to work with over the last few months. In a exercise of this nature, without the support of the Scottish business community, our and Data Lab’s efforts would be fruitless.
There are too many to mention each and every one by name in this blog but thanks to Scottish Government, NHS National Shared Services, Wood McKenzie, NCR, Merkle Aquila, Mudano, VShips, Scottish Enterprise and Scottish Power who all agreed to host more than 1 student this summer.
Roger Halliday, Chief Statistician and Data Officer at Scottish Government said
“We’re delighted to be taking on 5 people as part of their data science MSc this year. My ambition is to systematically improve outcomes for people in Scotland with data: saving time, money and lives. Data Lab and MBN Solutions play an impressive role in ensuring we get high quality data scientists”.
So, the months between February and May of 2018 saw us frantically working to match students to projects, facilitating meetings and introductions, dealing with feedback and, most importantly, handing over each and every successful placement to The Data Lab.
The Scottish FinTech community stepped up to the plate in a huge way and I’d like to thank RBS, Clydesdale Bank, Sainsbury’s Bank, Royal London, Aberdeen Standard Investment, Tesco Bank and Lending Crowd for their support throughout this period.
We’re delighted that so many students will receive their first experience of commercial Data Science within these organisations and we are sure their experiences will contribute to a very bright future.
Sainsbury’s Bank Chief Data Officer, Mark Hunter wrote “
Sainsbury’s Bank is delighted to be participating in this year’s MSc placement project. It is really important for the future of Scotland’s data industry that our students get exposure to real-world’ data projects and hopefully this experience fuels their desire to bring their skills to bear in Scotland after graduating. MBN have expertly managed the process of marrying our projects with the students who’ll benefit the most from the experience”.
So, with the Programme completed for another year, what did the results look like?
We are delighted to say that we exceeded last year’s total ”“ and more than matched our initial projection for this year ”“ with a total of 73 students securing Industrial Placements.
These students were placed with a variety of Scottish businesses; Start-Ups, large corporate organisations, SMEs and the public sector. Everyone played their part. From Aberdeen in the North, to Ayrshire in the South, students will be working on real-life Data Science projects throughout the summer that will greatly enhance their domain expertise and, ultimately, Employability prospects.
The last word?
We’ll leave that to one of the amazing students we were honoured to assist.
Kieran Kyle, an MSc. Student from the University of Strathclyde’s Data Analytics course said:
“The information provided at the Employability session was extremely helpful, not only for helping me find my placement, but also for carrying over into further job interviews. I managed to secure a placement with Standard Life, an incredible opportunity that I cannot thank Rob and the MBN team enough for, it is certainly something I would never have imagined just a few years ago”.