Lee Min-hyung joined The Korea Times in 2014 and has worked as a journalist mainly in Korea’s finance, tech and automotive industry. He specializes in content creation, breaking news and in-depth analysis currently on transportation and mobility. You can reach him via mhlee@koreatimes.co.kr.
Large, traditional banks unattractive workplace for IT experts
By Lee Min-hyung
Programmers prefer liberal, project-oriented office culture to incentives
By Lee Min-hyung
The much touted plan by major Korean banks to increase recruitment of IT experts continues to hit a snag, as software developers still do not consider the financial sector as an ideal workplace in terms of office culture.
Amid the rise of digital banking, traditional banks and financial firms here are on track to scale down their regular recruitment of conventional banking staff, as they seek to establish more skilled manpower in the area of IT and mobile banking.
Most big lenders are accepting applications for the positions year-round, in their bid to achieve a swift digital transformation to be ready for the post-pandemic world. But there appears to be a distinct difference between their desires and reality, as few IT specialists want to start a career in the financial industry and prefer to work at more creative workplaces with an open-minded corporate culture.
“When software developers choose a company, the top priority is on whether they can hold the key in pushing for a certain project and build their own portfolio career wise,” Lee Sang-hoon, a software developer at a Seoul-based startup, said.
He underlined that IT experts place less emphasis on the reputation of a certain company than conventional office workers, but focus more on whether they can independently achieve distinct outcomes at a workplace.
“It is common for programmers to move from one company to another in a short period of time, and they are accustomed to taking on project-oriented work,” he said. “Conventional banks may offer job security, but this does not come across as an attractive point. The long-held belief regarding banks' rigid office culture is also what they dislike the most.”
Another official who has worked in the IT industry for a decade also said it would be realistically impossible for banks to provide developers with incentives as huge as the ones offered by industry-leading IT companies.
“The annual salary of successful developers tops as much as 200 million won ($170,000), and their popularity will continue to soar in the post-virus world,” the source said. “For big tech firms, money is not a problem in attracting the more popular developers. In the end, banks and financial firms will not be able to compete with big tech firms in the race to recruit IT specialists.”
He also remained skeptical over whether financial companies would be able to satisfy such developers even after recruiting them.
“The financial industry is heavily regulated, so it is hard for developers to hold autonomy when carrying out projects,” the official said. “Those who prefer such an environment with less agility will move to banks, but this is not the case for most developers.”
Bank industry officials also concurred that they have had a tough time in hiring IT experts.
“Banks are aware of the tough reality in recruiting IT specialists, so we are widening our education programs for existing bank clerks to be more skillful in handling data-related tasks,” an official from Shinhan Bank said.
“For instance, we are teaming up with local universities for some of our staff to learn the basic-level of finance engineering or big data,” he said. “Even if it is hard for them to replace developers, more bank clerks at Shinhan are becoming accustomed to interpreting datasets as a result of this digital education.”
Woori Bank is also expanding its in-house education programs for more bank officials to be “digitally agile.”
“It is tough for us to drive innovative changes due to the regulatory nature of the industry,” a spokesman at the lender said. “No big lenders here will be able to achieve a dramatic leap-forward in their digital transformation even if they hire a group of the best programmers.”
For this reason, Woori's strategy is somewhat similar to that of Shinhan.
“We are focusing on retraining existing staff with a series of digital education programs,” the official said.
But this is not the case for major fintech companies here ― such as KakaoBank and Toss.
They are more like tech companies with almost half of their employees working in IT development and maintenance.
“KakaoBank does not face any big hurdles in hiring IT experts due mainly to our liberal office culture just like other tech startups or big tech firms,” a spokesman at KakaoBank said.
According to a recent survey of 598 college job seekers, JobKorea found that KakaoBank topped the list of the nation's most preferred financial firms. About 30 percent wanted to work at the internet-only bank, according to the survey. KB Kookmin Bank came in second with 28.7 percent.