Lepaya Talent Talks: How Backbase is shaping talent development for the future of Fintech

Welcome to Lepaya Talent Talks - an interview series uncovering best practices, strategies, and approaches for developing the skills necessary for both individual and organizational success in a rapidly changing world.

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In the Fintech sector, hard skills dominate. Building apps, developing new features for customers and optimizing AI requires people with the skills to write code, solve technical issues and deliver value to the business. But soft skills are equally important when it comes to building future-ready Fintech teams.

And that’s something Esther Jiron, the manager of people development at the Fintech company Backbase, believes is crucial to helping her organization reach its strategic goals. We sat down with Esther to explore the company’s people development strategy and the skills they prioritize for success. 

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First of all, what’s your favorite way to start the day?

“Well, I'm a slow morning person. But I do love my New York Times games just to get my brain working in the morning. I started with Connections and Wordle, and now I'm really obsessed with the Spelling Bee.”

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What does your role as Backbase’s manager of people development look like?

“It’s a small team, but we offer some key and critical functions globally. That includes onboarding, learning, and also performance and talent management. We focus on the global scope of things that apply to all employees. On the performance side, it's reviews, new hire check-ins, supporting one-on-ones and supporting with different skills, like giving feedback.

On the learning side, we focus more on building soft skills that are aligned to our strategic goals and priorities. We try to work with vendors since we’re a small team and bring in training for people to make it more accessible.”

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What are the skills that you’re really focusing on right now?

“The skills that we're really focusing on this year are developing a growth mindset and giving feedback. This is meant to support team cohesion, but also building our resiliency.

We’re looking to become more of an industry leader, tap into innovation and take risks…and we really want to give people the skills needed to push forward.

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We don’t do anything technical – we let different departments focus on that. And at the moment, we just work with Lepaya. But we really try to keep things scalable, pragmatic and simple, because we have one person that does onboarding, and then it's myself and a senior people development specialist. So, we also have to be realistic with our capacity and how many offerings we actually can have.”

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How has people development evolved at Backbase?

“In the past, I would say it wasn't really linked to strategy and priorities. There was more of a focus on well-being and productivity. It was a little bit of everything, with a lot of stuff around soft skills, but without a clear roadmap.

And this year, with the support of Lepaya, in addition to  streamlining our learning needs to [focus on] feedback and growth mindset, we also introduced 3 competency levels as well. This way, people can target their specific level within a skill."

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What are the challenges that you face when it comes to your L&D strategy? 

“I think a lot of people have the right intention of wanting to take part in the programs. But the reality is, business priorities always come first. I also think with our managers, we're seeing a bit of a dip in engagement, whether it's in their own development or their team development.

There's a strong focus on results and getting the job done, but maybe not so much on investing in people's growth and development. And a lot of things are just really viewed as additional – more tasks, more time.”

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Are you starting to use AI more in your people development role?

“It really helps us, because we use it to draw inspiration when we’re brainstorming, and also for reviews. You can get all this feedback and it summarizes it for you and gives you some actions. It also supports you with giving feedback as well, and improves the quality by creating a clear and concise message that’s more actionable.”

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Empowering people with the right skills anchors Backbase as an industry leader

With offices in more than a dozen countries and  commitment to reinventing banking, Backbase and its talent are on track to pursue their industry ambitions.

But taking time to focus on skills development helps its people support one another, develop in their roles, and ensure they offer clients an industry-leading banking experience.

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