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."

Comments

Re:money

[Kjella]

so the place that holds all the money can't make money... or is it another growth projection bullshit

Oh they're making money alright, but it's all in cost cutting. There's only so much you can do about interest rates and such because of market conditions, but cutting salary is a big deal. And honestly most people like online banking, so many that it's become a run on branch offices. Here in Norway 91% of the adult population (16-79) now use online banking, it's literally as common as having an email address which is also at 91%. I just checked at my bank, 300 employees to 380000 customers. That's well over 1000 customers/employee, when you consider all the non-customer facing work you need to do then probably many thousands per head. Unless you've got millions of dollars to throw around they literally don't have time to care about you. You get the online interface, the absolute minimum of customer support they can get away with but the profit is in all the people you have no contact with. Ever. And to be honest, the feeling is mutual - if there's a way to do it myself, I'd generally prefer that...

first burgers, now bankers

[BLToday]

"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.