Not all bankers need to fear the march of the robots.
Nordea Bank AB, which last month said it will need to cut 6,000 jobs as part of a process to become a more digital firm, is now offering some insight into who is likely to be hardest hit.
Customers should expect to be able to get advice from a human when it comes to things like wealth management, choosing a mortgage or an array of investment banking services, Nordea chief digital officer Ewan MacLeod said, adding however that they should not expect human contact if they lose and need to replace their credit card.
“Some transactions can simply just be automated, but many, and particularly in the investment banking industry, many of those transactions require humans, are based on human contact,” he said in an interview in Helsinki.
JOB CUTS
The Nordic region’s biggest bank has yet to outline how its planned job cuts are to be distributed. Unions representing Nordea workers say they have not heard any details. Nordea said last month the cuts are to be spread evenly across the bank, while chief executive officer Casper von Koskull even painted a specter of a financial industry 10 years from now with only half as many employees as today.
There are plenty of tasks more sophisticated than replacing a credit card where there is potential for automation, MacLeod said.
Although Nordea might be more aggressive in its digital push than many of its competitors, it is clear that others in the financial industry have now “woken up and smelled the coffee,” MacLeod said.
Even in investment banking, MacLeod expects a lot of support work to be automated in future, he said, adding that machine learning and artificial intelligence will “bring instant insight to those investment bankers’ fingertips.”
However, despite immersing himself in the subject every day, MacLeod said it is impossible to know exactly what to expect.
A bank’s defense against uncertainty is a willingness to experiment, he said.
“Experimentation is really important at this stage right now,” MacLeod said. “We know things are going to change, but we are just not quite sure how — not yet.”
“We are not sure” what kinds of skills bankers will be needed five to 10 years from now, he said, adding however that it is clear that success requires having a “digital native mindset.”
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