Engineering and technology graduates can look forward to more openings in the banking sector since banks are likely to hire a large number of technology experts.
The recruitment would be driven by the increasing focus of banks on attracting young customers and retaining them. The Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT) estimates that banks would need to hire technology professionals numbering up to about 10-20 per cent of their current workforce.
The institute, an arm of the Reserve Bank of India, has studied the customer relationship management process. ``Banks will need to focus on analytics to understand the life-time value of a customer and retaining them.
"This can be done only by mapping of transactions by experts,'' Mr B. Sambamurthy, Director of the institute, told Business Line on the sidelines of Bancon 2011 here on Sunday.
The need can be gleaned from the fact that over 200 million transactions take place in a branch in a month. ``To understand the nature of these transactions, banks will need experts in technology, statistics, maths and business analytics.'' Mr Sambamurthy said.
This would mean that the manpower requirements for banks would diversify further. ``There are over 3,000 engineering colleges in Inida and it is estimated that 15 lakh engineering graduates are comming out of colleges every year. This is a valuable human resource at which banks have to look at,'' Mr Sambamurthy said.
The increase in technology-based products will also make this imperative. ``The number banking products in India is at abour 1.5 on an average while the same is eight in advanced econonomies. The next phase of grwoth has to come from technology-driven products,'' he said.
According to Mr M Narendra, Chairman, Indian Overseas Bank, the growth in models like branchless-banking and implementation of financial inclusion are also make hiring of specialists a must.
``We are already hiring specialists and this will certainly go up in the years to come in the banking sector in general,'' he added.
There has been increasing interest among the technology porfessionals to take up a career in public sector banks due to expanding nature of the sector and concerns about prevailing economic environment," say experts.
``While engineers and technolocrats are not new in banks, I see a definite possibility of the number of openings going up in the next to/three years,'' Mr B. Govinda Krishna Kumar, Managing Director of a Mumbai-based placements and training consultancy firm, Global Advantage, said.