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Human Bankers Are Losing To Robots as Nordea Sets a New Standard (bloomberg.com)
Something interesting happened in Swedish finance last quarter. The only big bank that managed to cut costs also happens to be behind one of the industry's boldest plans to replace humans with automation. From a report: Nordea Bank AB, whose Chief Executive Officer Casper von Koskull says his industry might only have half its current human workforce a decade from now, is cutting 6,000 of those jobs. Von Koskull says the adjustment is the only way to stay competitive in the future, with automation and robots taking over from people in everything from asset management to answering calls from retail clients. While many in the finance industry have struggled to digest that message, the latest set of bank results in Sweden suggests that executives in one of the planet's most technologically advanced corners are drawing inspiration from Nordea. At SEB AB, CEO Johan Torgeby now says that "whatever can be automated will be automated."
so the place that holds all the money can't make money... or is it another growth projection bullshit
Bowing to the cyborgs that plays 4D chess with him.
will be ones requiring creative problem solving. Currently AI is behind in that area and may not catch up until neural processors improve in efficiency 1000 fold, which will be interesting to track, but Moore's law is coming to an end with silicon technology.
Net profit for the year, EURm 3,662 (2015) 3,766 (2016) 3,048 (2017)
Number of employees (full-time equivalents) 29,815 (2015) 31,596 (2016) 30,399 (2017).
Their highest profit year is when the had the highest number of employees.
As for the current quarter: "The results were also buoyed by previously announced capital gains from the sales of its Danish life and pensions business and a stake in credit information agency UC." Oh yeah, but robots are taking over and stuff. Who comes up with this crap?
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOOOO! MOOOOO! Moo cows MOOOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU NORDEA COWS!!
Including the mass corporate fraud? And taxpayer bailouts probably.
After all, cutting costs is what people look for in a bank. They should start racking it in anytime now.
"whatever can be automated will be automated."
I just can't wait for the fun and frivolity when someone figures out some flaw or hack in their 'banking robots' that allows someone to scam a bank out of millions.
I don't mean the bank - I mean that headline. "Company saves money by replacing people with a machine."
You're going to see variations on that headline over and over from here on out.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
As it should be. No one becomes a bank-teller, because they like it. Like hundreds of other jobs, it needs to be done, pleasant or not... We are all better off as these jobs are replaced by machinery.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I used to have an account with them, but I switched since they where nickel and diming everything plus they started charging extra for handling cash.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
Can a machine outperform a human
If you are asking "Can we save a buck by replacing humans" it is likely the decision will backfire and cost you money in the end. Just ask Elon and his new Tent factory
We've been seeing it since before most of today's newspapers first printed. How many coachmen lost their jobs to a steam locomotive? How many computers lost their jobs to, ahem, computers? How many milkmen had to look for another vocation with the invention of pasteurization process and of refrigerators?
And speaking of "headlines" — you do know, that putting together the printing matrices was a manual process too, don't you? The expression "freedom of the press" and "stop the presses" is still around, even though there neither the actual presses any more — and some publications stopped wasting paper completely?
Civilization evolves, lamenting the disappearances of some professions is stupid...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Consider, say, the Australian Tax Office in the 1950s when Parkinson wrote his great paper. There would have been no computers at all (possibly some punch card machines). Almost all the work done by hand. Collecting returns, reconciling payments, banking, internal processes, everything.
Consider the Tax Office today, after 60 years of automation. No human hand ever touches the average tax return. What has the efficiency dividend been? Zero. The tax office still consumes about 1% of GDP, just like it did in the 1059s. Note that this is a proportion of GDP, so accounts for growth in the economy, the office has actually grown substantially in absolute terms.
How could this possibly be? So much automation producing so little improvement?
Well, in the 1950s, the tax act fitted into a couple of smallish volumes. Today the act plus regulations and rulings would be too large to print out in any one place. It is orders of magnitude more complex.
The reason that it is more complex is because it can be. In the 1950s, without computers, it would be impossible to administer the current act. So it is actually computers that cause the complexity.
Whether all that complexity actually produces a more efficient and equitable society is, of course, very unclear.
So no, automation will not not reduce employment in government, banks, or any other bureaucracies because the rules will simple become more complex to compensate.
This, incidentally, why I am proud that many of the computer projects that I have been involved in have turned out to be absolute failures. Every project that succeeds just inflicts complexity on third parties.
Automation of manual jobs is another matter entirely. Certainly automation of agriculture in the last century has decimated the number of agricultural workers. Will everyone just end up as being petty bureaucrats? Or do we need to send off a B ark?
Automated CEOs should be right around the corner then.
Seems like they should be just about the easiest. Still, not holding my breath.
By all gods, you are gonna have a positive trainwreck of a 2020.
“You’ve been “adjusted.” ”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t understand that. Please restate the question.”
“While we appreciate your contribution, you’re being off-boarded”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t understand that. Please restate the question.”
“I said you’re being fired”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t understand that. Please restate the question.”
My local chase branch is all automated kiosks and one or two human tellers. Virtually every other bank has one teller or maybe two available at most other times. Unless you're depositing cash there is no reason to go see a teller since it all can be done at the ATM or with a smartphone.
"It's cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who's inefficient making $15 an hour bagging French fries," former McDonald's chief executive Edward Rensi said in an appearance on Fox Business Network in May 2016."
"Researchers at Sony’s computer science laboratory in Paris recently put out a set of pop songs composed by an AI system, which scans songs from a database to compose entirely new pieces in certain musical styles"
"It was generated by Heliograf, a bot that made its debut on the Post’s website last year and marked the most sophisticated use of artificial intelligence in journalism to date."
"The San Francisco firm EquBot has launched the first retail ETF to be managed using IBM’s Watson supercomputing artificial intelligence technology."
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
So if you want to bank where you can only get put on hold on a phone machine and will never talk to a human operator, this bank is your choice.
Punchline:"And then they automated the CEO's job, but there was no one left after everyone else was automated to object".
I am not sure about elsewhere in the world but where I live, the banks are constantly making huge profits with a large chunk of them reporting increased profits for a number of years running. This just sounds like a way to make even more money rather than just making a decent amount of money.
How did those socialist crack the "blame predatory lending practices on 2nd tier employees" problem? And do they clam that when the customers get signed up for services they never approved that it was just a bug? Or do they claim to have then fired the programmer instead of the banker? Surely this will fail soon like Venezuela, time to short those bank stocks like I did Tesla! #MAGA
Ethereum smart contracts can automate most banking services. Its amazing how fast its happening. World feels like its a month before August 1, 1981 when MTV went live. Cryptocurrency is like video and traditional banks are like the Radio Stars.
Nordea is best known for inventing new and innovative ways for doing money-laundering, tax evasion, and general financial assistance to high-level criminals. Although to be fair, despite their impressive efforts in those areas, they are still not close to leaders in crime-assistance such as Danske Bank.
I guess with everything automated, they can always blame a programming error the next time they get caught. And the next. And...
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
But if you find their blind spot, it will accommodate ridiculously large red flags. Of a size where you cannot get insurance because insurance only works when the insurer has considerably more money accessible for covering events of the insured kind than the insured party, and who has a larger money buffer than a regulated bank?
So there'll be government bailouts of bankruptcy affecting a "workforce" of mostly robots. Until the government has had it, and serial bankruptcies will become the rule, with companies having limited liability, their customers getting regularly stiffed and the machines moving on to the next shell company.
It's not like the model isn't known from construction industries.
Many companies would benefit from robo-CEOs, alas that's not quite the reality yet. But if it was, would there be anything objectionable about that? If the actual work gets done either way, why would you need a human to do it, work for the sake of work? In a competitive environment, the cost of anything boils down to human effort required to provide the goods or services in question. If required effort approaches zero, then does the cost and isn't that a nice thing. Heck, the internet is full of perfect examples, the cost of providing services to billions is so low, that you can cover it with advertisement and still make a helluva profit. Imagine a reality where that was not the case, where you would have to pay money for every single service you access on the internet. That's the reality we live in with the entire rest of the economy.
A lit of monotonous banking jobs are actually glue between dozens of systems that are anywhere from 50 to 2 years old. Now thrown in constantly changing regulations and consumer demand and ... There are some things tjat are better done in partner between robots and humans. You need some people on the factory floor as has been proven time and again in the auto business. Yes there is a lot to cut but there is over automation as well.
It is the brain parasites running the whole show
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2175045-business-students-more-likely-to-have-a-brain-parasite-spread-by-cats/
"Civilization evolves, lamenting the disappearances of some professions is stupid..."
Problem with the whole "the future is like the past" is that it's not true. What's happening in privacy and security shows that, even though it's some of the same actions that happened in the past, it's done on scales that didn't exist before. Or activities beyond their limitations. e.g. remote viewing.
Well, of course, because it makes sense to automate a CEO. I mean, most are fairly expensive, with some costing close to $100M/year to have. It really makes sense to automate something that can save $100M/year.
And many companies can easily save tens of millions dollars replacing their CEO with a robo-CEO.
Replacing the lower level staff generally has lower returns - because those staff are more numerous and you will often need to replace them with multiple robotic units. Plus since those generally are involved with production, it generally only scales linearly (to increase production, you need to increase the number of robots). Whereas there is only one CEO per company, needing only one robot to replace them.
So replacing CEOs makes a lot of sense - you can save a lot of money, and you only have one of them.
One of the biggest staff expenses in any organisation is the executive. They should prioritise automating the executives to save big $$$$ fast
The Cowbot Bank. I once suggested to the bank manager that all the employees dress like cowboys and cowgirls one day a year. "Moooooo," he said. "Moooooo..."
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy