‘Bankers replaced by bots won’t stay jobless’

Bloomberg

Sweden’s financial industry is growing at a fast enough pace to ensure that the thousands of bankers being replaced by robots will still be needed, according to the country’s financial regulator.
A digital revolution is seemingly making humans redundant. But Martin Noreus, the deputy director general at the Stockholm-based Financial Supervisory Authority, says most of the bankers affected won’t have a hard time finding new work in the financial industry.
“Unemployment is very low in Sweden, the financial sector is booming, the economy is strong,” Noreus said in an interview in Stockholm. “You have to accept that sometimes firms need to reorganize and restructure, adjust to technological development, and that will lead to change and, of course, you have to be aware that this can be very painful for both firms and for employees. But it is a natural consequence of economic development.”
Nordea Bank AB, the Nordic region’s largest lender, said in October it plans to cut as many as 4,000 full-time employees and 2,000 consultants over four years as a billion-dollar-plus investment in technology is rolled out. Swedish financial unions have warned that Nordea’s announcement is just the beginning.
But Noreus says that jobs lost in some corners of the financial industry will be replaced by new functions that only humans can perform in others. For example, the market for initial public offerings “is very strong” and there’s “quite a lot of investment coming in from private equity,” he said.
Sweden’s finance industry has grown even as the number of bank branches has declined. Banks,
pension and insurance funds, and the companies serving them employed more than 91,000 peo-
ple last year, up about 2 percent from 2008, according to data from Statistics Sweden.
But the digital transition will still be painful, Noreus said. “What we see in Nordea and in other banks, it’s just a continuation. If you compared today to the banking sector, the number of employees, in the mid-1990s, it’s very different,” Noreus said. “This is just the latest announcement. It’s natural and it’s something positive.”

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Nordea Bank AB is targeting a fourfold increase in the number of clients receiving investment advice. To achieve that goal, it’s using a robo-adviser.
Nora uses an algorithm to steer customers into portfolios that suit their risk and financial profiles. It has been available to clients in Sweden. Nordea will offer Nora in Norway and Finland early next year. Danish clients will have access before the summer, according the biggest Nordic bank.
Nordea is keen to brand itself as the Nordic bank with the boldest technology ambitions. The lender said in October it will get rid of 6,000 employees, including 2,000 consultants, as part of a digital transformation management says will help it compete in an increasingly automated world. Chief Executive Officer Casper von Koskull has even gone so far as to say that banks will only need about half as many employees 10 years from now as they have today.
“We still have the same ambition to help customers with physical
advice as we did before,” Katja Bergqvist, the head of Nordea’s Investment Solutions & Advisory
Center, said in an interview.