Wells Fargo managing director Mike Mayo has claimed he expects automation to eliminate over 100,000 banking jobs over the next five years.
Mayo told Bloomberg TV that the job loss to automation is ‘really a swap to bots from bankers’ and claimed that developers are the new bankers – with chief technology officers at banks now some of its most important people.
Mayo predicted that of the job losses, two-thirds of the cuts would hit back-office positions, while a third would affect front-office roles. A report put out by the company suggested that lower-paying positions were more likely to be affected by the cut.
While the Wells Fargo director suggested that tech would create new jobs at the company, he didn’t detail how many.
He remarked that tech will help banks become more efficient than they have been before, by allowing them to modernise call centres, back offices, and branches and that swapping to cloud and other third-party storage will also help.
There is also a need for banks to keep up with FinTechs relating to automation, Mayo said, a move that he believes would benefit customers, who he claims are increasingly in favour of online or digital online banking.
Mayo added, “The competition for tech talent has never been more fierce and banks are bearing some of the brunt of that.”
Mayo and other Wells Fargo analysts sent out a note in May that predicted as many as 200,000 jobs could be lost within a decade due to tech adoption.
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