Which jobs in finance will disappear or shrink greatly in the next 20-30 years?
Automation is inevitable and I've seen multiple forum posts about "Is so and so job dying?" or "Will so and so die in the next few years?" Does anyone know which jobs will become obsolete in the next few decades? Which jobs aren't worth pursuing currently due to their impending automation?
I've heard that Sales and Trading, Equity and Market Research, Investment Management, Private Wealth Management/Private Banking and Accounting are all harshly declining which is worrying since excluding IB, PE and capital markets, these are the great majority of finance roles gone.
Are all these industries actually declining or is it just speculation? Love to hear any insight into how the financial job market will change in the future.
Bump also interested
Whatever that can be automated first will go. Lets face it, management and shareholders dont care about you and would prefer to have your salary as additional profit.
Middle office/back office jobs are done, and will be completely automated in that time span for sure. S&T is as lean as it gets right now, so I don’t personally think more will be automated out. Now S&T consistently gets murdered by regulations which will eventually fuck us all of out jobs. I think regulation will do more damage than automation in the long run.
Would anyone know the alternatives or next steps to middle office roles? What woud general business management role become after the automation takes over? Open to consider other industries, but prefer to retain 130-160k salary.
I wouldn’t say PWM is harshly declining. Yes if you’re just another random shmuck who only does asset allocation, you will likely be replaced and lose a fair amount of AUM to the betterment’s and wealthfronts of the world...
But those that actually provide a service to the client, tying in the many different facets of financial advising and tax planning with a human face, many practices will thrive. Tbh, I see it as more of a positive. Joe shmuck’s practice gets so small he has to fold, lets say 50% of his remaining clients need to find a new FA, that’s more of the pie for me. Hone your craft, master it over years, and unless AI makes some magnificent leaps and bounds of progression, I think it’ll be good for at least the next generation of wealth advisors.
Disclaimer: I understand processing power doubles roughly every 18 months, but it would really take one hell of a bot to replace an advisor people feel they have a real connection with that does more than just asset allocation.
Agreed, I think automation will just kill small fries (guys with clients that have
Sorry to be this guy, but the term is small fry. A fry is a juvenile fish which is just capable of eating/feeding on it's own having used up all the egg yolk that is attached to its body. Better someone catch that mistake on this forum, than in the office.
Some of wealth management can’t be replaced.
Almost every family especially ones with money have an idiot son with a coke habit etc or even just an idiot. There’s a big time space for a trusted guy who can do all the functional things, but can try to prevent people from doing dumb things with money. An app can’t automate that.
This - PWM is growing at the bigger firms (JPM, Merrill). A lot of the rote work is largely automated - client reports are basically self-generated.
But the human side of it will remain.
Smaller guys are probably fucked tbh.
FoF (primaries, secondaries and coinvestment)
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In the CF realm I have been shocked to find that some old employees spend hours a day refreshing reports that should only take 10-15 minutes if you have an intermediate knowledge of excel. Aerospace & Defense is rife with old software and even older button-pushers trying to "work the computer". If I had to put a number on it, I'd think we could cut 20-30% of our finance workforce just by using better/more formulas to automate reports. I think we could cut another 20-30% by having better software that builds these reports and metrics automatically.
And I'm not even talking about AI.. I'm sure there is more consolidation that can happen with AI. Though I imagine with that consolidation, it would mean that we could just grow the business, take on more contracts than we were able to before, bid lower, etc. Not necessarily just shrink the workforce and keep revenue the same.
In any case, my only hope is to get past the grunt work/analyst years before automation kicks in. It's like running from the boulder in Indiana Jones
Absolutely, during my brief time in corporate finance it was amazing how many of the lower level (but mid 40s) financial analysts spent there 40 hours (or less) a week on tasks that could be automated with macros or more sophisticated programs fairly easily.
If you want to be working in fp&a 10 years from now and make a good living then you need really a diverse set of skills. Finance skills alone are not very differentiating. You need technical skills, really approaching developer levels, to really be more of a sure thing.
Found this study that suggests automation could actually create more finance jobs than it takes away. It would just shift the skillsets needed by employees rather than permanently destroy jobs.
Sellside trading.... already happening in equities/FX.... fixed income (rates, credit) is next
I work in the back office at a large Investment bank (JPM/MS/GS). The goal of leadership is to get rid of as many rank and file workers as possible. Some automation is happening right now. In terms of people losing their jobs, there has been a lot of laying off people in high cost locations (such as New York and New Jersey) and rehiring them in lower cost locations (Arizona and Texas). The company is starting to build out more offices internationally, so I think the next wave of layoffs will be to lay off people in lower cost US cities and replace them with people working overseas. I don’t hear any discussion about replacing front office people for the most part. The bank if anything wants to have more people in client facing/revenue generating individuals.
As far as the workers, some people can’t do things in Excel as basic as sorting the data. A big part of that is we are paid to be yes men and women. All they care about is that you hit your monthly quotas in terms of production in quality. If I become more efficient that just means they will raise the bar for me in terms of how much work, they want me to get done.
The second paragraph here gave me cancer.
As many have noted above, the ones most likely to be automated would be the back office roles and those that are just rote work. However, the ones likely to maintain are front office client-meeting roles and managerial roles simply because as advanced as automation has gotten, its still incapable of replacing the human aspect so very crucial to client facing roles or those of managers. However, in the near future, you may see these human roles supplemented with AI in order to make their job easier or to sort out data.
In 10 years, what Wall Street role will disappear? (Originally Posted: 07/27/2013)
Of course, there are a number of threads here on WSO about how ER, S&T, whatever, is dying. What actually is dying?
Humans.
Randomly came across this. Made me laugh.
Fixed Income
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