When it comes to leadership skills in the financial sector, some key attributes can pay dividends from a human and economic perspective. Leading people with certain strategies and specific goals can lead to success for your clients, employees, and the institution. Let’s take a closer look at the five most important leadership skills that executives in the banking sector can leverage.

Technical Leadership Skills

Technical skills for a leader include an understanding of how the industry works.  More importantly, a leader should have the ability and desire to share this knowledge with employees on how to work within the sector’s parameters for the client’s benefit.

Diagnostic Leadership Skills

The ability to see and identify an issue is critical in any role.  This is especially important when it comes to finding solutions for your client’s financial needs.  It is critical to understand the available options and how they can solve your employee’s client’s issues.  Furthermore, communicating these solutions will bring success to your frontline staff and, most importantly, your institution’s clientele.

Human Leadership Skills

At the end of any day, any leader is working, collaborating, and spending their time with other humans.  As a leader, knowing how to work and interact with people on a personal level is invaluable.  Encouraging relationships, stoking communication, and empathizing with issues outside of the context of work is essential in creating an inviting and inspiring environment.

Analytical Leadership Skills

The financial sector is rife with data and information. The ability to understand, decipher, and communicate this data is critical in order to do your due diligence, and your due diligence is crucial to your clients. These skills also need to be shared with your employees.

Conceptual Skills

Conceptual skills are a combination of the aforementioned talents. Utilizing all of these abilities in a strategic way can make your institution and employees successful.  Furthermore, organizing these abilities and implementing plans for your team will create great potential for your bank’s clients.

During the most recent session of the Graduate School of Banking at LSU, Stephen Robichaux covered these critical leadership skills and more for the Junior students in his class, “Leading Through Motivation.”

Simply put, a financial market is any marketplace where interaction takes place between those who require capital and those who have capital they wish to invest. This capital could include any financial asset such as loans, equities, bonds, and derivitives.

For any professional within the financial sector, a strong working knowledge of the various types of financial markets and the important roles they play in our capitalist society is absolutely necessary. This is why “Financial Markets” led by Dr. Mike Highfield is one of the required courses for all freshmen students attending the Graduate School of Banking at LSU.

In the course, students develop the foundational finance knowledge needed to complete all remaining coursework at GSBLSU. The infographic below highlights just one of the many topics covered: the various roles of financial markets. By understanding the bottomline purpose of these markets, students are better able to understand all instruction that follows, including the role of intermediaries, the nature and functions of money, the level and structure of interest rates, diversification, and much more.

 

 

When it comes to financial assets, cryptocurrency is the wild west. It’s still new and largely misunderstood, but its potential is huge. Unfortunately, the misconceptions surrounding cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin, leave many who could benefit from diving in. This is one of the many topics covered by Timothy Peterson in GSBLSU Junior class, “Introduction to Digital Assets for Bankers.”

Bitcoin Myths:

1. Bitcoin is mostly used for illegal activity – Although there have been concerns about bitcoin being used for illegal purposes, less than 1% has been known for illicit activity. Of that 1%, it was not used for money laundering, trafficking, or other criminal purposes.
2. Bitcoin is anonymous – Bitcoin is completely traceable on a public blockchain. All that is needed is an IP address associated with a wallet
3. Bitcoin is a bubble -The spikes and dips in Bitcoin are due to price manipulation by bots, not by people.
4. Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme – A Ponzi scheme promises quick returns to investors of a non-existent enterprise. Bitcoin investors are ensured no such returns. In fact, its value is notoriously inconsistent.
5. Bitcoin is an inflation hedge – Bitcoin has no correlation with short and long-term inflation.
6. Bitcoin will replace Sovereign Currency – Cryptocurrency is unregulated and highly controlled by institutions or billionaires, unlike sovereign currency that the government regulates.

There is a 1 in 960,000 chance of getting struck by lightning, and a 1 in 220 chance of dating a millionaire. The chances of experiencing a data breach? 1 in 4.

Long gone are the days when you did not have to worry about a cyber-attack on your organization. No matter the size of your bank, you are at risk. It’s not a matter of if, but when a breach will occur. Today, more than ever, it is imperative to have the correct processes, technology, training, and people in place to best protect your organization.

The first step to mitigating cyber-attack risk is understanding the types to which you are most susceptible. Threats like hackers, ransomware, phishing, corporate account takeover, and ATM compromise are just a few of the myriad of breaches an organization could experience. Identify which of these pose the greatest threat to your institution and customers. Then, put into place the following practices to ensure you are ready and equipped for a data breach when it occurs.

1. Train Bank Employees to Identify Potential Data Breaches

The only way employees will know about risk is if they are trained and tested to identify it. It isn’t enough to simply talk about risk. Risk awareness needs to be an ingrained part of the corporate culture, from the top down. Employees must be encouraged, empowered, and equipped to do their due diligence in seeking out potential threats, and they must understand the critical role they play in preventing potentially catastrophic data breaches.

It is also important to keep your customers in the loop. Keeping them abreast of your bank’s risk awareness procedures and policies will ultimately create a deeper sense of trust and transparency between bank and customer. They want to know their data is safe and what you plan to do to keep it that way.

2. Establish clear processes

A formalized and clear plan must be created for what the guidelines are in different risk situations. Every step, from the moment a breach has occurred, should be established and clearly communicated.

Governance Frameworks like NIST, ITIL, and COBIT need to be established from the beginning.

3. Use the correct technology

Having powerful technology to protect the data of both your bank and customers is important, but something that is even more crucial is making sure that employees are trained in how to use it correctly and to its full potential.

If your bank’s employees, processes, and technology are not working together, there will be a greater chance of a data breach. While risk may not be imminent, establishing a risk awareness framework for your organization needs to be done immediately to protect your bank’s data as well as that of your customers.

This is just a snippet of the teaching of Chad Tagtow, CISSP in his GSBLSU class, Risk Management & CyberSecurity.