Home Intelligent Automation One in Three Retail Bankers Are Worried About Losing Their Jobs to Automation

One in Three Retail Bankers Are Worried About Losing Their Jobs to Automation

One in Three Retail Bankers Are Worried About Losing Their Jobs to Automation

Many bankers are worried that they won’t have jobs for much longer. A recent LinkedIn survey of those working in the financial services sector found that one out of three retail banking professionals (34%) are concerned that automation could put them out of work.

Among all employees in the industry, 25% are worried that automation will impact their job security, according to the survey.

Overall, a large percentage of the 1,012 people surveyed believe the battle for the labor of tomorrow is mostly being fought on the fintech front. Innovation is changing the banking world like few other industries, and although 39% say that the traditional sector will co-exist just fine with the emerging “neo-banks” of today, almost one in five (18%) called fintech a “direct threat” to the status quo.

Those surveyed also have a very different view about what types of automation and fintech are the most important depending upon their role. More than half of Investment banks (55%) and nearly two-thirds of fintech professionals (63%) say that machine-learning- or artificial-intelligence-based investing is the key development that the world has seen so far.

Financial advisors and wealth managers, on the other hand, overwhelmingly (68%) see “robo-advisors” as the most important development, while the majority of retail bankers (54%) believe it to be digital lenders.

Fintech professionals (44%) and investment bankers (35%) also view blockchain as a much more important development than retail bankers (15%) and financial advisors/wealth managers do.

banking automation
Image credit: LinkedIn

But no matter how many people say they are not worried about various aspects of automation and fintech, Lex Sokolin, global director of fintech strategy at London-based fintech research firm Autonomous, isn’t buying it.

“Based on a LinkedIn sentiment survey of professional humans in financial services, a quarter, or 25%, are concerned about automation leading to job loss and redundancy,” wrote Sokolin, about the survey on LinkedIn. “Anecdotally, it’s 100%.”

Gerard Varjacques, founder and CEO of New York-based Haboker Consulting and an IT engineer by trade, puts it even more bluntly. He was among those who responded to LinkedIn and told the social network that bankers are right to be worried.

“It’s not a fear or anxiety — it’s a fact,” he told LinkedIn “You have less and less traders, and more and more automation.”

Photo credit: DasWortgewand / Pixabay

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