Hoping to land a job in finance, Andre Ponik spent hours rehearsing what he was going to say. He uses keywords from job listings, makes eye contact — and follows advice he’s received from recruiters.
But Bonnick, a University of Warwick student, wasn’t prepared to speak to a human resources manager. He tackles the initial screening rounds, which are done by software powered by artificial intelligence.
As more companies adopt AI, students are preparing to start a career in banking and finance. Once they get in the door, they face the question of whether humans will have jobs in the next few years.
Most executives agree: AI implementation will cut jobs. JP Morgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon said in December that technology will “eliminate jobs.” Citigroup Inc. CEO Jane Fraser said some of the jobs “will no longer be needed,” while Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chairman John Waldron referred to employees as the “human assembly line” for automation.
As Standard Chartered Plc CEO Bill Winters said: “It’s not cost-cutting; it’s replacing in some cases low-value human capital with financial capital and the investment capital we invest.” (He later apologized for his comment.)
Those latest comments have industry workers wondering if their jobs are safe. Even for those at the highest levels, the risk of AI changing their roles has increased.
While executives including Dimon and Barclays Plc Chief Executive Officer CS Venkatakrishnan have talked about retraining and reskilling workers to protect some jobs, it’s unclear how that will work in practice, said David Parsons, an employment lawyer at Mishkan de Reya.
An investment banker in the United Arab Emirates, who asked not to be identified, joked that he won’t be needed in the next five to 10 years after using Microsoft Corp.’s Copilot to help him pitch a last-minute elevator pitch before a client meeting.
“It’s fair to say the middle office is vulnerable,” Parsons said. “That’s what’s different about this wave of automation, which affects jobs up the chain.”
Students attracted to finance for its stability and high-paying nature over the years are now finding less entry-level roles available to them.
“I was hoping to apply for a master’s program to give me another year to apply for jobs,” Bonik said.
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Banks are cutting junior analyst classes by two-thirds, while 62% of their AI talent comes from the same partners, says senior partner and head of Quantumblock, McKinsey & Co. said Debashish Patnaik, Head of AI Consulting at
According to Patnaik, while graduate intakes will “shrink”, banks are unlikely to abandon them entirely.
“Banking is an apprenticeship industry. Today’s junior analysts become tomorrow’s managing directors,” said Patnaik. “Senior judgment cannot be made sideways.”
Target use cases
Overall, banks are currently trying to implement AI in some functions, including customer service and transaction and trade monitoring.
“Rather than looking for Battleship Galactica, all-song, all-dancing banks run by agentic AI, we’re going to see many single-point use cases in the coming years,” said Anthony Jenkins, former CEO of Barclays and founder of consultancy 10x Banking Technologies Ltd.
Citigroup unveils conversational AI-powered wealth management avatar that provides financial guidance to clients. A multilingual avatar can advise you on what to do when your bank certificates of deposit mature or how to manage your children’s college funds.
Venkatakrishnan said earlier this year that Barclays is using AI to track calls involving human customer service staff, helping to improve efficiency without putting jobs at risk. The company said in February that since the program was introduced in October, it has seen efficiency gains briefly with AI making more than 8 million customer calls.
Digital Bank Revolut Ltd. It recently launched an app AI assistant called AIR that helps customers sort expenses, travel and essentials or set card restrictions.
It’s designed to make financial management “as easy and natural as sending a text,” said Julia Ponomareva, Revolut’s partner and general manager of customer experience and AI products.
Based on hiring and interviewing activities, some recruiters feel that banks will not lean on AI. As Warwick student Bonik prepares to speak with an AI bot in a screening interview, banks are unlikely to use such technology because the risks are significant, according to Tom Login, global head of the future of work at recruitment firm Robert Walters. At least one screening software company removed the facial analysis component in 2021, he added.
Separately, some are wary of the effects of layoffs on certain functions.
“If you lay off a large number of junior employees, or lay off management staff who are mostly women, there are big discrimination risks,” Parsons said. “It’s a low-cost risk.”
There is also doubt that many of the job cut announcements so far are truly related to AI.
“I think a lot of companies have too much bureaucracy, and they can use AI to cover up the fact that they shouldn’t hire those people in the first place,” Dimon said at JPMorgan’s China Summit in May.
For many, AI is touted as a way to avoid grunt work. However, presentation platforms and assessment models are widely accepted as necessary learning tools.
Graduates are broadly speaking and the sector is difficult to break into, said Timothy Lee, a student at the University of Warwick who leads its business and finance community.
“Before Covid came, class sizes were increasing a lot,” said Lee, who accepted a job from Wells Fargo & Co.
Of course, some banks are moving forward with programs to train and hire new employees. Bank of America Corp. has committed to 2,000 summer interns and another 2,000 full-time recruits this month across eight types of businesses.
However, the bank wants the workforce to be consistent and use AI to drive efficiency.
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