Jamie Dimon says "old jobs;" Bill Winters says "lower value human capital." How rude
What kind of job do you do in an investment bank? If it is an "old job," bad luck. If you are also a person of "lower value human capital," tough times. Both phrases sound a bit rude, but only Bill Winters at Standard Chartered has been beasted for saying the latter. Winters has since apologised.
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Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan isn't apologising for talking about "old jobs." Precisely the opposite. Talking to Bloomberg, Dimon said Winters had been "inartful" in referring to "lower value human capital." It will be "old jobs" that disappear, added Dimon. He didn't say which these are though.
Some are already known, though. If you work in a "monitoring" job at Standard Chartered, you may have already discovered that your job is old and that you are low value: 88% of monitoring jobs at the bank have been replaced by AI.
Other jobs that might fall into the category of "old" and occupied by "low value" persons are outlined (albeit not in these terms) in Goldman Sachs' recent shareholder letter. The bank firm is working on "six workstreams" that are susceptible to AI automation. These are: client onboarding and KYC; vendor management; regulatory reporting; lending; enterprise risk management; and sales enablement. If these are your habitats, bad luck.
Needless to say, all banks are busily exploring the kinds of 'operational efficiencies' that might eliminate tens of thousands of jobs and enable them to hit their costs of capital and reduce their cost income ratios. Many of the roles susceptible to these investigations are situated in what Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick calls "core infrastructure." - "Classic operational flow" and "surveilling" are subsets that lend themselves to "efficiency," says Pick. Surveilling and monitoring sound like the same thing.
It's not just surveilling and onboarding etc. though. Pick says Morgan Stanley also has "a client agent inside of the electronic trading platform" that can answer technical questions. Jamie Dimon seems to be suggesting today he might hire fewer bankers as AI advances. AI has also been threatening junior jobs in private equity firms since at least 2021: why employ a young ex-banker to filter deals when an impartial LLM can do it for you.
In the circumstances, many jobs look old. Many people look "low value." Everyone's a marginally additive anachronism. Relationships are the new gold. And knowing how to plumb a sink.
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