The Robots Are Coming for Wall Street
Hundreds of financial analysts
are being replaced with software.
What office jobs are next?
By NATHANIEL POPPER Photographs by JONNO RATTMAN
FEB. 25, 2016

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In late 2013, two Oxford academics released a paper claiming that 47 percent of current American jobs are at ‘‘high risk’’ of being automated within the next 20 years. The findings provoked lots of worried news reports about robots stealing jobs. The study looked at 702 occupations, using data from the Department of Labor, and assigned a probability of automation to each one, according to nine variables. The conclusions made it clear that this was no longer just the familiar (and ongoing) story of robots replacing factory and warehouse employees. Now software is increasingly doing the work that has been the province of educated people sitting in desk chairs. The vulnerability of these jobs is due, in large part, to the easy availability and rapidly declining price of computing power, as well as the rise of ‘‘machine learning’’ software, like Kensho, that gathers and assimilates new information on its own.

The Oxford study received plenty of criticism — understandably, given the patina of exactness that it tried to apply to a speculative exercise. Nevertheless, the financial industry is taking automation very seriously, both as an opportunity and as a threat. It is one thing to make a few analysts redundant, but automation could put whole business models in peril. Investments in what is known as fintech, or financial technology, tripled between 2013 and 2014 to $12.2 billion, and start-ups are now taking aim at nearly every line of financial business. Decisions about loans are now being made by software that can take into account a variety of finely parsed data about a borrower, rather than just a credit score and a background check. So-called robo-advisers create personalized investment portfolios, obviating the need for stockbrokers and financial advisers. Nearly every Wall Street firm has put out research reports on the tens of billions of dollars of revenue that might be lost to these upstarts in the coming years. Banks are trying to fend off the newcomers by making their own investments in start-ups like Kensho, which has raised more than $25 million so far.

The skilled industries that form the bedrock of New York City’s economy have so far largely avoided this sort of transformation, because the work of financial analysts, publishers and designers hasn’t been easy to automate. But to look at a company like Kensho, and the sort of conversation it generates across the financial industry, is to see the degree to which these trends are now confronting industries that used to be thought exempt from this sort of disruption. Last fall, Antony Jenkins, who was dismissed a few months earlier as chief executive of Barclays, the giant British bank, gave a speech in which he said a coming series of ‘‘Uber moments’’ would hit the financial industry.

‘‘I predict that the number of branches and people employed in the financial-services sector may decline by as much as 50 percent,’’ Jenkins told the audience. ‘‘Even in a less-harsh scenario, I expect a decline of at least 20 percent.’’ This process could, in at least some cases, help do away with some of the expensive bloat in the financial system, providing more transparent services with fewer hidden fees. It could also be seen as a satisfying blow against the titans of an industry that only recently almost crashed the world economy. But so far the burden of job losses is stopping just short of the executive suites, even as the gains in efficiency are worsening already troubling levels of income inequality.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/the-robots-are-coming-for-wall-street.html?_r=0