(Thomas Dishaw) I keep saying the banking industry is on the verge of mass layoffs. When it comes its going to be quick and hard, no pun intended. Banks are outdated, boring and most of all people hate them. They offer no value in a value driven economy. The biggest innovation they can take credit for is the ATM and that was 46 years ago. According to a new report from Tech Insider a tsunami of banking layoffs will hit by 2020, thus making empty banks ideal real estate for Government holding centers to be used by FEMA or the TSA.
Tech Insider reports: Job losses in the banking sector have been massive since the 2008 financial crisis – UK banks alone have trimmed more than 186,000 staff. But the next wave of layoffs might not be triggered by a macro-level meltdown, but rather by a surge in new technology led by fintech companies that are both competing against banks and selling them products to streamline their in-house systems.
Either way, fintech start-ups have the potential to put an increasing number of banking professionals out of work by 2020. After all, their raison d’être is to make financial services more efficient by increasing its reliance on technology and reducing its reliance on humans.
“One of the biggest business trends, not just finance, is the increased use of computers to replace people. And as finance is an industry based on data, not physical objects like car manufacturing, I suspect this trend will be even faster in finance,” says Huy Nguyen Trieu, author of the blog Disruptive Finance and an MD at Citi in London.
Which finance roles will be most vulnerable to the rise of the robots within the next five years? “In general terms there are two categories of jobs which fintech start-ups are impacting,” says Markus Gnirck, co-founder and global COO of Startupbootcamp. “First, jobs which focus on data and information and are mainly done by humans now; and second, jobs involving a lot of repetitive processes.”