Zopa is competing with tech giants not banks for talent, says CEO
ZOPA is competing with Google and Facebook for talent, not the likes of HSBC, the peer-to-peer lenders’ chief executive Jaidev Janardana (pictured) has said.
Speaking at the Finovate conference in London on Friday, Janardana said that the tech giants were “redefining things” in terms of improving the customer experience, compared to traditional banks who are struggling with outdated technology and siloed systems.
“If you have a customer-focused culture, that attracts far greater talent than places where it’s about making money or something different,” he said.
“The tech we use allows us to attract talent and to compete with the Facebooks and Googles of the world, not the HSBCs of the world.”
Read more: Zopa on hiring drive to support credit card launch in 2018
Janardana also said that the tech giants have added a tremendous amount of value but made companies’ lives harder by changing customer expectations.
“Customers increasingly want to interact when they want to interact…they expect things to be done instantly,” he said.
Janardana said that Zopa, which is set to launch a digital bank later this year, has been using Artificial Intelligence (AI) for four years. “It enables you to catch a lot more non-linearity in the models enabling you to make better credit decisions,” he said. “The ability for humans to add value to that becomes minimal to zero.”
The reasons that banks have stayed away from AI are an inability to understand the benefits and risks and legacy tech systems, he added.
Read more: Zopa launches income verification tool using Open Banking data
