We asked three members of ACCA Ireland’s financial services panel to share their insights into how the sector has coped with the health and virus containment issues raised by Covid, and their expectations for the future as the country navigates a return to economic health.
Niall Gallagher, managing director of Citco Corporate Services (Ireland), says that his organisation ‘had a very stringent business continuity plan that we put into effect in March and which worked very smoothly. Globally, we moved 8,000 people to working from home with no adverse impact on client services.’
Stephen Kenny, group internal audit portfolio lead for credit risk at Bank of Ireland, agrees the experience shows that ‘once the right technology is in place, most activities can be performed from home as easily as from an employer’s premises’.
For some however, working from home has not been an option. For Grainne Murphy, CEO of Ballinasloe Credit Union, a key challenge has been to keep the institution’s doors open for the public. ‘This was critical as we have many customers who depend on us entirely for their banking needs,’ she explains.
She adds that the central, often underappreciated, issue in this scenario has been childcare. To manage it, ‘those people who didn’t have support worked from home, and we really pulled together as a team to get through’.
All three accept that the challenge of remote working is more acute for new personnel, and suggest a greater focus on team meetings, zoom calls and virtual social events to help combat that.
Kenny says that while the home-working environment means ‘less opportunity for new hires to assimilate knowledge through being in an open plan environment’, it also makes it somewhat easier to reorganise existing teams. ‘As everyone is interacting remotely, the location of team members is no longer a constraining factor.’
Remote challenges
While many complex tasks have proved surprisingly manageable, there were expectations that areas such as audit would pose distinct challenges for staff unable to work from the office, which were all the more pertinent given the environment of heightened risk and uncertainty.
Gallagher says that, for Citco, ‘the work of both internal audit and audit of client entities was already being undertaken remotely. The only difference now is our own team is working remotely. You can’t pop your head over a desk to ask a question.’
Murphy thinks that there are issues to be resolved in the credit union sector. ‘Auditors need a sense of the business they are auditing, so there have been challenges. We need to need to think about how that will operate in the new reality.’
For Kenny, who leads an internal audit team within Bank of Ireland, the crisis has provided an opportunity to add value by ‘adapting our assurance plan to focus on emerging key risks and sharing insights with management in real time. I believe that our standing in the organisation has been enhanced as a result.’
Customer focus
The need to maintain service levels to customers has also been a priority for all.
‘It was very important for us in the credit union sector to be able go back to full service as soon as possible and to maintain the confidence of our members, many of whom lost their jobs overnight,’ says Murphy.
Bank of Ireland has provided a range of supports for customers hit financially by Covid-19, including payment breaks ‘often based on a simple online application’, Kenny says, with more tailored sustainable solutions also available. ‘We were already on a course of digital transformation. The pandemic has made this even more important.’
Reflecting on the nearest possible comparison to the pandemic, the financial crisis of 2008, Gallagher says that while there are some lessons, there can be no direct comparison. ‘It’s being handled in a much different way by governments,’ he says. ‘Supports are being given to keep businesses and sectors in good shape so recovery can be quicker.’
Shape of the future
While there can be little economic certainty in the short term, many believe Covid-19 heralds a major rethink on the future of the office. ‘It is hard to imagine a return to the pre-Covid model,’ Kenny says. ‘Employees will be slow to relinquish the flexibility they now enjoy, and employers will be anxious to limit their costly office footprints.’
For Gallagher, while ‘the scale of the number of employees in financial services businesses will change, the clustering of organisations is still important. We will still need an ecosystem of administration, legal services, audit and advisory firms and banks operating in close proximity.’
Murphy sees the rapid adaptation of both employees and consumers to radically changed circumstances as making change all but inevitable. ‘We will need to continue to adapt, and there’s a great opportunity to expand our services beyond the traditional nine to five. A really good balance can be struck, so there are opportunities that can emerge from this crisis.’
Fighting back
Irish financial services companies displayed their crisis resilience in responding to Covid-19, which will benefit the sector longer-term, according to a survey of members by Financial Services Ireland, the Ibec group that represents the industry.
