Banks are already global organisations,
and some teams within these have
pioneered a global way of working and
collaborating. We believe that there is
an opportunity for many more teams
to become global, expanding the
possible talent pool significantly and
allowing different cultural approaches
to combine in solving the same
problem. Product development teams
– in both investment and retail banking
– will also be able to work faster as
global collaboration enables 24-hour
development cycles, quickening the
speed to market and reducing reliance
on any particular region for innovation.
The bigger banks will continue their
shift out of CBDs in the developed
financial centres, with the eventual aim
of leaving only a core of client-facing
teams and some support staff in the
most expensive locations. All middle,
back and remaining front office staff will
be located in cheaper, but not out-of-
the-way locations, to ensure a balance
of cost and talent acquisition. Centres
of excellence will predominate for back
and parts of middle office, probably on
a regional rather than country basis.
In the growing and new financial
centres, banks will continue to locate
themselves in CBDs as a way of
establishing their business, but as
these financial centres grow and costs
increase, we believe the same trend out
of the CBDs will occur here too.
Cost and its reduction will remain
a key goal of any real estate and
workplace strategy – twinning with
better occupancy ratios and better
actual occupancy. According to the
banks we interviewed, workplace
costs – as a proportion of operating
costs – today are typically between
8% and 11% for an efficient bank, but
there is significant scope to reduce this
through the introduction of flexible or
activity based working.
Through adopting agile working,
and cloud-based technologies and
services, organisations will be better
able to charge departments and
business units for their workplace
by need and use, rather than by
legacy. This idea of Workplace-as-a-
Service (WaaS) will radically transform
business units’ understanding of
the cost of their workplace, and will
drive innovation in its use and the
demand for greater flexibility.
One head of real estate suggested
the ideal would be a smaller presence
in the centre of London with satellite
working centres around the edge
of the city to reduce the cost of
space, and to provide enhanced
work-life balance for employees.
Collaboration
across
boundaries
CBD or
secondary
locations?
Cost
models
58
The future of the financial workplace
|
September 2014
