15 minutes with: Caroline Wayman

How would you describe your role?

I lead the financial services team for PA globally, and personally specialise in all things regulatory, customer, governance, and leadership. I work with my colleagues to help our clients, across the public and private sectors, deliver great overall outcomes for their customers. That’s the heart of it. We do that in a range of ways, helping people with their most difficult problems. I work very closely with boards and executive teams to help them shape their approach, and answer the most difficult questions they're facing, which is a great privilege of the role.

What are the biggest challenges your clients are facing today?

The first big challenge is how to make decisions and look forward in what are incredibly volatile times from a macroeconomic perspective. There’s a lot of uncertainty and upheaval. My advice is to resist the temptation to wait for calmer times, because that’s unlikely to happen.

Ultimately, the macroeconomic uncertainty is creating quite a lot of cost pressure, and it’s in many ways a perfect storm – our clients’ customers are feeling the pinch, which means they need support, but businesses themselves in most of our geographies are also finding markets difficult.

The second major challenge is working out how AI will change financial services and the rest of our economy. Increasingly, almost every conversation I have has an element of AI in it. It’s a really difficult question for boards and executive committees to answer at the moment. Nobody can say with certainty where AI is going, but we know it’s already transforming our lives. All of our clients are grappling with how to build a strategic workforce plan against that backdrop, innovating fast to avoid missing out, and putting good ethical approaches and guardrails in place. Balancing those things is a really big topic right now. I chair the board of Nottingham Trent University, and so we’re innovating there about AI from a learning context as well.

How do you help clients to address these challenges?

The first thing we do is really listen to the client, and not immediately jump in with a ready-made solution. Before I joined PA, I worked at one of PA’s client organisations, The Financial Ombudsman Service, and I could see that the team properly listened and got to the real root cause. Often, it can be tempting for senior, experienced businesspeople to think, “oh yes, I know exactly what's going on there”, but it’s important to listen and take a step back. Being expertise-led and evidence-led are essential – making sure we properly understand the problem and bring practical solutions.

One of the reasons I love working at PA is that we roll up our sleeves and co-create new ways of working, new systems, new approaches, new structures. It’s not just theory. Theory is great and strategy is important, but what we’re very good at is turning strategy into deliverable, tangible results for clients and, in turn, their customers. One of my clients recently told me that their team is better for working with PA. That’s gold to me.

Which of your projects have delivered the biggest impact?

I’ve led a lot of projects with clients around Consumer Duty regulations, which were introduced a couple of years ago to proactively require clients to deliver good outcomes for customers. We’ve supported lots of clients – including large building societies, banks, motor finance providers, and wealth managers – as they ask themselves difficult questions about whether their products and services genuinely deliver good approaches for customers. For example, are they delivering good outcomes? Are their products fair value? These are fundamental questions that financial services businesses have to look at to identify how to do things better at a very practical level. Sometimes, it feels uncomfortable. A colleague recently said to one of our clients: “if it hasn't felt uncomfortable, then you probably haven't done it well enough.” That’s a great provocation.

I also do quite a lot of work to help people put things right and demonstrate that to the regulator. I can think of examples where we’ve been able to help people go from knowing something hasn’t gone well, such as a customer issue, and put them back on track. It has helped them to regain the confidence of customers, the regulator, and importantly to put in place strategies to prevent that happening again.

I also enjoy the opportunities to work with senior leadership teams and help them with the tough challenges they are facing now. These include the volatility and uncertainty that we are all facing, how to deliver growth and efficiency, delivering great outcomes for customers, and how to develop a culture of inclusivity and diversity within their organisations.

What do you think is the biggest potential impact of AI for your clients?

I think emotional intelligence and interaction on a human level will become even more important. However, we still need to work out what that balance is. Sometimes, we put too much weight on the idea that humans make brilliant decisions all the time. But we’re full of unconscious bias, and if we’re not careful, we risk embedding some of that unconscious bias into future decision-making tools.

These are big questions for the whole world of work. And then, what’s the regulatory answer? What will risk teams, compliance teams, and HR teams need to do? There’s a philosophical question about what AI tells us about the future skills we’ll need and how to bring the best of both to live fulfilling lives. Because, in the end, that’s the whole point.

What advice would you give to somebody who wanted to get into your area of work?

My first advice, always, is to be curious and be open to learning. In consulting we have to continuously make sure we stay on top of our areas of expertise. You can’t stand still. You need to stay current and be in touch with the big developments in your sector (and beyond it). For me, that encompasses a whole range of things, including how regulation is developing and thinking strategically about what it means and where it’s going.

My general advice is to look for experiences that help you learn, and don’t specialise too quickly. Be ready to explore. That’s why our graduate programme at PA is so brilliant, because you get to experience different things. And yes, at a point in time, you want to choose your main area, but my experience and knowledge across retail financial services and the public sector means I know about a broad set of things, not just, for example, banking. So, be open-minded.

What are your future goals, professionally or personal?

Live well and be happy.