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

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.