Big banks have dire predictions for those who spend all day ‘keyboard hitting’

Earlier this year, Kai-Fu Lee, founder of VC giant Sinovation Ventures, said that the rise of the machines will lead to widening inequality as lower-level jobs get swallowed up in numbers well beyond the grimmest of forecasts.

Don’t look to the banking industry for a counterpoint.

In a series of interviews marking the 10th anniversary of the global financial crisis, the Financial Times took the pulse of execs from several leading banks and found many of them are girding for imminent — and substantial — job losses.

Jamie Forese, president of Citigroup’s   institutional clients group, said 10,000 of the bank’s 20,000 tech and operational roles are “most fertile for machine processing.” He suggested they could be gone within five years.

What kind of jobs are at risk exactly? Barclays investment boss Tim Throsby put it another way when asked about what the future will look like:

‘If your job involves a lot of keyboard hitting then you’re less likely to have a happy future.’

Throsby explained that machines will take over “lower-value tasks” and a smaller number of employees will be making more money.

Forese’s comments are reminiscent of those from Deutsche Bank’s John Cryan, who previously said half the German bank’s workers could be replaced by robots.

The FT calculated that if those numbers were true for the broader banking industry, the potential job losses would outpace the ones we saw from 2007 to 2017, when almost 60,000 jobs were cut from eight of the world’s top 10 investment banks.