Research at the University of Leicester found that an increase in the number of female traders in a market reduces the occurrence of crashes.6 Firms with monocultures suffer a quarter more governance-related issues than their peers, according to the FCA.7 And the IMF found that banks with higher shares of women leaders had higher capital buffers, lower nonperforming loans, and higher ‘distance to distress’. 8  Figure 3: Likelihood of financial performance above national industry median (%)  Source: ‘Delivering through diversity’, McKinsey, January 2018. 6  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/88c1/6ee1ff277cd71340dd15980537174658016f.pdf https://www.fca.org.uk/news/speeches/women-finance-keeping-pressure-progress 8 https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/Staff-Discussion-Notes/Issues/2018/09/17/women-in-finance-a-case-for-closing-gaps-45136 7  4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  4  There are several reasons for these findings:   First, recruiting a more diverse team means you are fishing in a bigger talent pool – so you should be able to choose a better team.   Second, more diverse teams make better decisions, because they have more ways to approach problems, and are better at self-challenge; and    Third, diversity improves a firm’s connection to, and empathy with its customers. Within a trading environment, research suggests that adding more women to trading teams tends to improve risk management, increase average returns, reduce the incidence of ‘over trading’ (or trading for the sake of it), and improve a team’s capacity to monitor for, admit to, and learn from past mistakes. But if diversity is so great, why has it taken so long for FX and other markets to begin to embrace it? We can only speculate.

The increased speed with which these technological advances enable market participants to respond to developments is opening the door to deeper analysis, significant efficiency gains and new business models. 9  https://www.bis.org/publ/mktc10.pdf 5  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  5  Such changes in technology inevitably also imply profound changes in the type of jobs, and skills, needed in the FX industry. Traditional manual execution roles, where traders place orders on behalf of customers or their own book, are disappearing fast – and with them the ‘boiler room’ trading environments they spawned. But as some roles disappear, others grow. The focus now is on exploiting creative ideas, knowledge of customer needs and risk management, strategic judgment and technological savvy to develop and maintain a competitive edge. And that is exactly the environment in which diverse teams are not only an advantage, they are a necessity – for all the reasons I stated a moment ago. The revenue-generating stars of the future will not be the big swingers of the past: McKinsey10 argue that half of the value-added in wholesale banking will be created by just 10% of the future workforce, but none of those roles sit on today’s senior teams. If technology and innovation are transforming the FX products of the future, they are also transforming the way people work.