A New Niche for Practitioners

As decentralized and distributed services and products continue to enter the marketplace and the disruptions that these tools bring are felt throughout the market and by different actors, it will also be important for practitioners and organization to obtain the appropriate mindset. There is a phrase used in the accounting profession, which is one that can be applied to different subsets and areas of the financial services profession as well: riches are in the niches (McCausland, 2000). Generalized services, lower-level tasks, and virtually every aspect of workplace activity that can be automated will be automated, and this will invariably cause margin compression, fee restructuring, and generation of differentiated services. This is already underway, and the tried and true solutions of investing in more automation while also reducing employee headcount will simply not be sufficient to compete effectively going forward. Organizations as large and sophisticated as BlackRock, Deloitte, Fidelity, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Invesco, Bank of America, Citi, and numerous other firms in other industries are currently dealing with these forces with a combination of investment, hiring of different employees, reduction of current headcount, and launching of digital solutions. That is well and good, as well as being absolutely necessary, but a different tactic will be required going forward.