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Building diverse tech teams is critical to an enterprise’s long-term success. While increasing diversity in tech is a complex, systemic challenge, there are basic, effective ways to make your company more welcoming to underrepresented candidates.

There’s no magic bullet to increasing the diversity of your technology organization, but Visa’s vice president and head of HR business partners, Samuel Tam, has a few recommendations for small changes that can have an impact.  

“Something as simple as the way that you write your job descriptions can really impact your recruiting approach,” he said during a recent Rise and IGNITE interview alongside Albrey Brown, VP of strategy at hiring platform Joonko, an Insight Partners portfolio company. For example, in the past he’s used software from writing platform Textio to “help us refine the language of our JDs,” to make them more appealing to underrepresented candidates, he said. “That was incredibly helpful.”  

Tam also recommends that tech leaders pay attention to the details: Even “something as easy as having your email signature link to your employee value proposition” – which should tout a commitment to diverse teams – can affect how candidates (and current employees) feel about your firm.  

Similarly, he urges leaders to make their firm’s current diversity stats – and future aspirations – easy to find: “Be honest and transparent and open with these goals, and how you’re tracking and measuring them,” he said.  

“Even if they’re not where you want them to be,” Joonko’s Brown added. “If you’re not upfront, that’s going to raise more questions than answers. I think that underrepresented candidates understand that no one is good at this: If you’re proactive throughout the process about sharing your diversity numbers, then it at least says ‘Hey, this company is self-aware.’” 

You can watch Tam and Brown’s full conversation here.

As Goldman Sachs restructures, its chief information officer has rolled out new processes – including a technique popularized by Amazon – so that its 12,000+ developers are more engaged. 

To feel content at work, developers need to understand the business purpose behind their work, according to Goldman Sachs’ chief information officer Marco Argenti. Instead of asking tactical “how” questions before beginning a new project, Goldman engineers are now prompted to understand the impact their work will have on the firm’s bigger-picture goals.  

“Now, we want them to answer the ‘why’ questions,” Argenti said at a Wall Street Journal event on Wednesday. “That is a big change.” 

Argenti, who is less than a month into his new role as sole CIO, has also instituted the “working-back” memo exercise made famous by his former employer, Amazon. Engineers now work together with bizdev employees on mock press releases for the products they’re going to build, before development starts. This helps with employee empowerment and retention, Argenti said.   

Argenti’s interview comes as Goldman is shaking up divisions and management to elevate its tech offerings. His former co-CIO, George Lee, now leads Goldman’s new Office of Applied Innovation alongside former Alphabet executive Jared Cohen.  

Argenti’s not the only one waxing on about keeping engineers happy lately: A Capital One exec recently explained how the bank has motivated talent and mitigated burnout through automation. The emphasis makes sense: Despite layoffs across Wall Street more broadly, competition for engineers in the financial world is still fierce.   

Evaluating a potential fintech partner doesn’t have to be a headache. So-called sandboxes – or self-contained test environments with synthetic data and prototyping tools – can take the pain out of proof-of-concepts for highly regulated incumbents that are eager to work with fintechs.

Lloyds Banking Group has launched a new “Innovation Sandbox” in partnership with NayaOne, which will accelerate its ability to evaluate fintechs.  

Relationships with cutting-edge startups can help legacy institutions like Lloyds bring new features to their products or revamp their own internal processes, but their security and regulatory requirements can mean that any integration requires significant investment – even before both parties decide a relationship is the ultimately the right fit.  

NayaOne aims to change that. Through its sandboxing tools, it promises to help highly regulated financial services firms test out fintech partnerships securely, in less time, and at a lower cost. 

“The launch of the Innovation Sandbox has improved our ability to experiment and learn with the fintechs at pace,” Lloyds’ chief technology officer Vic Weigler said in a press release.  

Cloud computing promises to bring advanced capabilities and efficiency to financial institutions, but it’s also an important tool to help them meet ambitious climate-related goals.

Data centers are energy hogs, so transitioning away from on-premise servers can be a boon for financial firms’ climate goals. UBS just underscored that potential by announcing that moving from its own private data centers to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform reduced the energy consumption of some workloads by nearly a third.  

The two firms also co-created an application programming interface (API) that recommends ways to schedule heavy workloads for times when clean or low-carbon sources of electricity are most available. The open-source software is available for other firms to use.  

This is the second recent example of a big financial institution teaming up with a cloud giant to co-launch software: Banco Santander and Google have partnered to sell technology that makes it easier to migrate from mainframes to the cloud. 

Ultimately, UBS plans to have more than 50% of its applications running on Microsoft’s cloud within five years. 

Double materiality allows investors to not only understand the environmental, social, and governance risks facing their portfolios, but also the ESG impacts that those assets could have on the wider world. The more forward-looking, comprehensive principle is already baked into EU regulation, and is starting to gain traction in the US (while also facing blowback from conservatives).

JPMorgan is doubling down on double materiality through its partnership with software firm Datamaran, which powers its new ESG Discovery tool.  

“This holistic view enables investors to make a more informed decision about how and where their investment is deployed in a way that goes much further than the traditional financial tools they might have relied upon until now,” Donato Calace, SVP of innovation at Datamaran, told Insights Distilled, adding that the analysis gives users a “longer-term perspective” on the “value drivers of the future.” 

Datamaran’s software uses natural language processing to automatically identify and monitor these risks. 

Beyond providing double materiality – which is more forward-looking than standard ESG – the software notably doesn’t try to provide a rating or score for any given company. This was a key reason JPMorgan chose to work with Datamaran, as other AI-powered platforms simplify the complexity of ESG too much, an exec said of the partnership. 

Instead, Datamaran compiles and centralizes information about hundreds of ESG risks and opportunities, paired with analysis that includes input from JPMorgan researchers, so that clients can see the underlying data when making decisions. 

Dedicated innovation centers have become a go-to way for incumbents to galvanize creativity, agility, and ambitious projects in emerging areas like Web3 or the metaverse.  

$548 billion-asset Truist just announced a new stand-alone innovation group called Foundry, which will work across the bank to build new products and features. The unit aims to operate like a startup within the bank. 

“The decisions that banks make over the next two to three years from a technology perspective are going to define who wins over the next decade,” Truist’s head of strategic initiatives, Christina Russ, said. 

Such dedicated initiatives are meant to create room for experimentation at-speed – though the model doesn’t always work. For example, ING overhauled its dedicated innovation program earlier this year, citing the need for sharpened focus. 

Foundry pulled about a fourth of its 45 workers from The Long Game, a financial games app the bank acquired in May. Buying fast-moving startups and then integrating their employees into new product lines can give big banks a culture jolt that breeds innovation. 

Variable recurring payments (VRPs) provide a more secure, transparent, and lower-cost alternative to direct debits or card payments. Though they’re regarded as the future of bill, subscription, and invoicing payments, as well as one-click ecommerce, banks have been slow to enable them, in part because of the technical and regulatory challenges.  

NatWest just launched partnerships with three fintechs – Token, Yapily, and Tink (a former Insight Partners’ portfolio company that sold to Visa) – to provide more opportunities for variable recurring payments for its customers (the bank previously announced relationships with TrueLayer, GoCardless, and Crezco). The fintechs each have their own specialty, including bill pay and one-click checkout.  

VRPs save time, reduce fees, provide transparency, and lower the risk of failed payments for merchants, while providing more security and flexibility for consumers. The UK requires banks to provide VRP for sweeping (where money is automatically transferred between accounts belonging to the same person), but NatWest is the first UK bank to provide VRP for use cases beyond that as it aims to be on the forefront of the technology for its customers. 

“We’re committed to offering innovative and convenient payment methods to businesses and consumers,” NatWest’s head of APIs, Daniel Globerson, said of the partnerships. “VRP brings greater simplicity, control, and flexibility to payments. It’s fast, cost-efficient, and uses the very latest in bank API technology.” 

Implementing a digital overhaul involves more than just technical challenges: It requires a cultural shift that relies on buy-in from an entire organization.  

There’s in-fighting at UBS between CEO Ralph Hamers, who aims to use technology to expand the bank’s breadth, and the head of UBS’ wealth business, Iqbal Khan, who favors a more high-touch and traditional approach, according to a sweeping Bloomberg report.  

The report paints UBS, which has maintained steady returns, as caught in a power struggle between those who embrace Hamers’ vision for algorithm-driven expansion to a broader subset of potential clients, versus those who want to abide by Khan’s remit to build relationships “not with machines, but with people.” 

Hamers’ digital vision faced a significant setback when UBS’ $1.4 billion acquisition of robo-advisor Wealthfront was abruptly cancelled last month. It remains to be seen whether Hamers’ digital push and customer expansion ambitions will win out over Khan’s influence.   

Read the rest of the Bloomberg piece here. 

America’s oldest bank made waves when it launched its crypto custody service earlier this month, but a top exec says that knowing when to partner with specialists is one of its greatest strengths.

BNY Mellon earned well-deserved credit for being the first traditional bank to launch digital asset custody services in early October, but an executive is quick to point out that it needed to rely on fintech partners to maintain its high standards for client protection.  

Despite the bank’s “very thorough and robust cybersecurity departments,” it’s entrusting wallet management to Fireblocks, an infrastructure platform it invested in last year. Digital assets are a new beast for the bank, so it “looked across the industry at specialized firms,” BNY Mellon’s CEO of custody services, Caroline Butler, told Protocol. Fireblocks also counts BNP Paribas and ANZ Bank among its clients. 

Knowing when it makes sense to partner with subject matter experts is one of BNY Mellon’s key strengths, Butler said. “[Clients] are appreciating that we have the ability to innovate in a very measured and prudent fashion.” 

BNY Mellon also partners with Chainalysis for compliance. 

Banks are realizing that by pairing automated rebalancing and algorithmic advice with phone advisor consults, they can win over younger, digital-savvy investors without a high price tag.

The likes of JPMorgan, Ally Financial, Truist, and Bank of America have all expanded from offering standard automated robo-advising to providing supplemental personal consultations with financial advisors. Clients can speak to an advisor via either phone or video, allowing banks to serve lower-net-worth clients than their advisory services typically reach. 

The shift gives banks a way to offer clients a more personal touch, at a lower price, which helps strengthen relationships and build trust.  

“This is a milestone for us and a way for us to serve a whole new set of clients,” JPMorgan’s CEO of US wealth management, Kristin Lemkau, said in the recent announcement of the bank’s personal advisors service.  

Each bank offers its own combination of investment minimums and fees to access its human advisory services, though all still clock in at lower prices than traditional financial advisors.  

“Robo advice is yesterday’s term,” said Javelin Strategy director William Trout told American Banker. “You need a human element.” 

Giving people access to digital tools that broaden access to investment strategies once reserved for the ultra-wealthy is a focus for both fintechs and legacy institutions. (Though that shifting emphasis between high-touch, prestige relationships and purely algorithmic ones recently sparked tension at UBS.)