The significance of executive education in the BFSI sector

The BFSI sector in recent years has experienced the demand for a completely different kind of managerial skill-set across levels as compared to a decade back. This is because the geographical, social, economic and technological context in which these organizations existed earlier has evolved beyond recognition.

Earlier, finance management was a broad genre and largely described as the delivery of funds and management of capital. But the contemporary nature of this industry has morphed into something more. Today the banking, finance and insurance sector involves circulation of capital, investments, lending, revenue management, financial & business analysis, asset management, various forms of life and non-life insurance, actuarial science and wealth management, to name just a handful of the subsets within this large and diverse domain.

From an operational perspective, the industry has witnessed changed organisational structures, extensive outsourcing and remote working. More importantly, the middle and top management of these companies face a unique set of challenges intrinsic to the nature of this highly regulated industry. These include narrowing profitability gaps, non-stop innovation, increasing customer responsiveness to meet stringent regulatory mandates, balancing demand volatility, juggling an ever-growing bouquet of communication channels and managing new complex services & value chains.

This is where the world’s best executive education programs like the IIT Bombay-WashU executive MBA step-in. From a curriculum point-of-view, such programs offer the participants from this industry an exhaustive refresher and an update in the fields of finance, accounting and economics with modules like corporate finance, strategic cost analysis and macroeconomics to name a few. On the other hand they provide the much required ‘non-finance’ related exposure to ‘financial managers’. These include modules like strategic management of innovation and global business planning & strategy that focus on leadership training, followed by organizational behaviour & design and communication & negotiation skills as core business anchors and finally cross functional immersion using modules like data & modelling decisions and marketing management.

An executive MBA program like the one developed through the partnership between IIT Bombay and Washington University in St. Louis, assists banking and finance executives in stepping beyond functional domains and developing their skills in the area of enterprise-wide management. This is further facilitated through top-class mentoring with the help of national and international faculty that have extensive years of teaching, research and industry experience.

Many BFSI sector executives have acknowledged that there has been extreme compression of the time scale on which dramatic changes in the industry take place now compared to a decade ago. Adjustment cycles are much shorter. There is a need for a strong pool of candidates who can take up leadership roles in this industry, as the industry itself stands on the cusp of unfathomable uncertainties and immense opportunities. Executive education helps in creating this highly talented resource bank and a pipeline for strategically critical jobs that will exist in the very near future.