AI Will Wipe Out Half the Banking Jobs In a Decade, Experts Say

Experts in the industry say that current advances in artificial intelligence and automation could replace as many as half the nation's financial services workers over the next decade, though it will take a big investment to make that happen. The Mercury News reports: "Unless banks deal with the performance issues that AI will cause for ultra-large databases, they will not be able to take the money gained by eliminating positions and spend it on the new services and products they will need in order to stay competitive," James D'Arezzo, CEO of Glendale-based Condusiv Technologies, said. Intensive hardware upgrades are often cited as an answer to the problem, but D'Arezzo said that's prohibitively expensive.

Speaking to an audience last year in Frankfurt, Germany, Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan predicted a "bonfire" of industry jobs as automation moves forward. "In our bank we have people doing work like robots," he said. "Tomorrow we will have robots behaving like people. It doesn't matter if we as a bank will participate in these changes or not, it is going to happen." Increased processing power, cloud storage and other developments are making many tasks possible that once were considered too complex for automation, according to Cryan. D'Arezzo, whose company works to improve existing software performance, said the financial industry is being swamped by "a tsunami of data," including new compliance requirements for customer privacy and constantly changing bank regulations. Bhagwan Chowdhry, a professor of finance and economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, offers a less bleak view of the future. "Technology will eliminate some jobs that are repetitive and require less human judgment," he said, "But I think they will get replaced by other jobs that humans are better at. Anything that requires judgment is something humans will continue to do. We are not good at multiplying 16-digit numbers, but we're good at judging people and detecting if someone is telling the truth."

Comments

Soon AI Blockchain Clouds will rule the world.

[Mr307]

Yes computers will make more trades and replace some workers in the financial arena, but its not AI, its still good expert systems.

We used to have editors that knew some tech stuff and wouldn't just spam clickbait all the time.

Re:Soon AI Blockchain Clouds will rule the world.

[Alwin Henseler]

We used to have editors that knew some tech stuff and wouldn't just spam clickbait all the time.

Maybe they were already replaced by some AI machinery years ago, editors have been sitting on a beach somewhere sipping Margarita's, and even us haven't been smart enough to figure it out. Good job there /., your AI gear passed the Turing test!

Judgment

[mentil]

we're good at judging people and detecting if someone is telling the truth.

Hahaha, no. Experienced detectives trying to tell if someone is lying in response to a yes/no question, using their gut instincts, do no better than a coin flip. Also, remember this story posted just a few days ago: multiple forged signatures, and no investigation done before $Millions were already forked over to the scammers. Think about all the stories of scammers who use social engineering to convince corporate officers to wire them $Millions. OTOH, AI (ok, algorithms) has been used in automated fraud detection systems for decades.

Besides, technology being ABLE to replace half of workers is very different from those workers actually being replaced. Many banks are led by conservatives, and won't rush out to replace half their workforce; they'll slooowwwwllllyyy roll it out in test markets for a decade first, maybe waiting for several competitors to announce plans to do so first. Remember how long it took to roll out EMV in the USA? We didn't even get 'chip & PIN', just 'chip & signature'... oh and they got rid of the signature requirement so it's just 'chip' now.

haha!

[Anonymous Coward]

For someone who works in a LARGE bank. Let me just say this
BWAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaHAHAHAHAHA.

The one I work at is using software that EOL'd 5 years ago. This is a mainline program. They are just starting to replace it. There are thousands of programs like that. The supposition here is new unveted software is going to replace everyone. The banking industry lives and breaths microsoft excel. All of their internal software imitates that program in some way.

HAHA my catcpa is tableau

Those same "conservatives" had no trouble

[rsilvergun]

shifting nearly all tech work overseas in less than 10 years. I watched it happen overnight. I lived through it (and the constant layoffs). Banking executives are only "conservative" in the sense they don't like paying taxes. They're plenty progressive when it comes to saving money. Remember, we've structured their pay around stock price, and the best way to raise stock price is to have fewer employees. That's why everytime the economy tanks there's mass layoffs to bump the stock. This'll be the same thing, only this time the jobs aren't going overseas, they're just gone.

We're about to head into another industrial revolution. The last few had decades of unemployment, wars and social strife before tech (and the New Deal) caught up and people were employed again. If you're going to do something to avert the next upheaval now's the time to start voting people into office that'll address the problem with something other than more "conservative" tax cuts for bank executives.

Or don't. I'm getting up there in the years and won't make it past 55 with my health problems (and I'm a /.er posting on a Friday night, so you can bet I don't have kids). So what do I care?