How to Lower Banker Attrition While Maintaining Rigor

The Talent Retention Problem

There’s a reason why attrition rates for first-year investment bankers are high.

New hires, fresh out of school, are asked to time manage in ways they likely never have. They must juggle multiple responsibilities across various stakeholders with minimal room for error, at all hours of the day. These former superlative students have likely never had to communicate across competing stakeholders, fostering the necessary dialogue with harried superiors to prioritize multiple tasks.

In today’s age, many get quickly burned out. A lot of the foundational work is characterized as “pedantic” for a cohort that wants to quickly progress. Ensuring perfect formatting, pulling comps, and learning how to build foundational models can feel repetitive. While there are elements of truth to this, these are the necessary primitives for what the job entails, and it is almost a rite of passage to go through it.

Therein lies the problem. This is not about coddling; it’s about showing the ropes to talented, success-motivated individuals who find the balancing act challenging. Those who can’t balance execution with the need to learn about the capital markets often stall out. While they are getting their day-to-day tasks completed, they are not planting the seeds of future success. These can be promising employees, for whom the bank has made significant investments, all the way back to early recruiting. There must be a better way.

Helping employees get up the knowledge curve while also ensuring they are productively delivering should not be left to chance. Organizations need to get smarter about how they unlock deep sources of institutional knowledge for the leaders of tomorrow. While the classic solution has been a rotational training program, this is an expensive endeavor, especially if some percentage of those new hires ultimately decide to pivot away from the job.

A New Approach

At ModuleQ, we believe that institutional knowledge is the lifeblood of an organization, and that blood too often has poor circulation. The reason why modern tools such as wikis and knowledge repositories fail is because they force the employee to interrupt their already-busy workflow to hunt for this valuable information. Some percentage will refuse the short-term interruption and suffer the long-term consequences.

One unlikely solution that is helping banks retain talent while not sacrificing on deliverables comes in the form of a new technology, but not the one you think. Prompted AI like the multiple chat services that have made headlines, requires training for prompt engineering. Additionally, their unfettered access and integrations inside banks raise serious security concerns. There is a different, more responsible way for banks to make use of AI.

With Unprompted AI, ModuleQ delivers a daily snapshot of information relevant to the specific user, ensuring they are getting the most from the vast internal resources at the disposal of investment banks. A ModuleQ user is not just a “banker” vs an “admin”; it is role-specific, based upon seniority, industry, or focus. While ModuleQ delivers actionable information to senior bankers who are juggling multiple client demands (see our white paper on how ModuleQ unlocks ROI for these senior bankers), it can also deliver valuable information to junior bankers looking to get smarter about companies, their industries, and the markets, without attention shifting away from necessary deliverables. All of these insights come from the trusted internal repository of knowledge within the four walls (or trusted vendor servicers) of the bank; not confabulated by a Generative AI. We do this by serving a handful of key insights directly to their communications hub. By pushing this insight, versus pulling the banker away from their tasks, they will absorb more without context switching and dropping the ball.

In today’s increasingly challenging environment for acquiring and nurturing talent, ModuleQ’s Unprompted AI offers a solution for banks keen on improving the learning curve of all bankers, while improving the attrition rates of their juniors.