Macquarie CEO Says Bank Struggling To Recruit Talent

(Bloomberg) -- Macquarie Group Ltd.'s chief executive officer said the bank is struggling to recruit staff even as it boosted its global workforce by more than 10% in the past year.

“We're certainly finding it's really hard to get the talent we want,” Shemara Wikramanayake said on Tuesday at the Macquarie Australia conference in Sydney.

The bank has added more than 2,000 workers in the past year in the data, technology and operations areas, Wikramanayake said.

The bank employed about 18,000 globally, according to its 2022 annual report.

Australia, which is one of Macquarie's major markets, is facing an acute shortage of workers, with the country's labor market the tightest in almost half a century. Skilled workers, including in financial services, are particularly in demand.

Wikramanayake said while technology has disrupted many parts of banking and other industries, it also presents “huge opportunities.”

“I know at Macquarie we use technology for onboarding clients, for client experience generally, especially in our digital banking offerings, fraud prevention is a place we use it, looking at human biases in our analysis of data,” she said. “So, there's no end of places that we're using this.”

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