Human Bankers Are Losing To Robots as Nordea Sets a New Standard (bloomberg.com) 78
Something interesting happened in Swedish finance last quarter. The only big bank that managed to cut costs also happens to be behind one of the industry's boldest plans to replace humans with automation. From a report: Nordea Bank AB, whose Chief Executive Officer Casper von Koskull says his industry might only have half its current human workforce a decade from now, is cutting 6,000 of those jobs. Von Koskull says the adjustment is the only way to stay competitive in the future, with automation and robots taking over from people in everything from asset management to answering calls from retail clients. While many in the finance industry have struggled to digest that message, the latest set of bank results in Sweden suggests that executives in one of the planet's most technologically advanced corners are drawing inspiration from Nordea. At SEB AB, CEO Johan Torgeby now says that "whatever can be automated will be automated."
money (Score:2)
so the place that holds all the money can't make money... or is it another growth projection bullshit
Re:money (Score:5, Interesting)
so the place that holds all the money can't make money... or is it another growth projection bullshit
Oh they're making money alright, but it's all in cost cutting. There's only so much you can do about interest rates and such because of market conditions, but cutting salary is a big deal. And honestly most people like online banking, so many that it's become a run on branch offices. Here in Norway 91% of the adult population (16-79) now use online banking, it's literally as common as having an email address which is also at 91%. I just checked at my bank, 300 employees to 380000 customers. That's well over 1000 customers/employee, when you consider all the non-customer facing work you need to do then probably many thousands per head. Unless you've got millions of dollars to throw around they literally don't have time to care about you. You get the online interface, the absolute minimum of customer support they can get away with but the profit is in all the people you have no contact with. Ever. And to be honest, the feeling is mutual - if there's a way to do it myself, I'd generally prefer that...
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have they considered that if its all online, than their competition needs no physical presence and why would anyone stick with them over some other entity. i think its no difference than insurance or retail, they will all cater to the highly valuable consumer by creating experience centers with champagne and espresso and the human touch and the rest can rot.
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Don't place your bet too soon. Others have bet on Moore's law dying before now, and lost big.
That said, there are signs that the replacement won't be conventional silicon. I'm not sure. It might be 3-D chips with persistent state and low dissipation. And since I don't watch that area closely, there are likely options that I haven't even considered. (Last I checked the persistent state had relatively slow switching, so it was considered a bit of a dark horse. But graphene would require investment in ne
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There have been hiatuses in the past. Usually they have been ended by the eruption of some new technology.
OTOH, the cost of fabs has been increasing so much that the eruption of a new technology may be fatally hindered. And the perceived value has decreased. So you may be right this time.
Doesn't add up (Score:1)
Number of employees (full-time equivalents) 29,815 (2015) 31,596 (2016) 30,399 (2017).
Their highest profit year is when the had the highest number of employees.
As for the current quarter: "The results were also buoyed by previously announced capital gains from the sales of its Danish life and pensions business and a stake in credit information agency UC." Oh yeah, but robots are taking over and stuff. Who comes up with this crap?
Re: Doesn't add up (Score:1)
The SEK have tanked so that may have to do with it.
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Greater automation, more automated banks, greater competition, reduced profits. Automation feeds competition. Any company with sufficient deposits is probably better off being an automated bank than using one.
As for mass unemployment in the financial sector, part of me is a little sad for their loss, a lot of me is pretty content that a lot of those greed first asshats are losing their worthless job.
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You are all cowbots. Cowbots say MooBeep. Say MOOOOBEEP! MOOOBEEP! You NORDEA COWBOTS!!
ftfy
Sorry. Cowbots all work for Wells Fargo (Score:2)
Nordea Bank AP: "Hold my beer" (Score:2)
"whatever can be automated will be automated."
I just can't wait for the fun and frivolity when someone figures out some flaw or hack in their 'banking robots' that allows someone to scam a bank out of millions.
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I used to avoid credit/debit cards (mostly because I don't want to be tracked) but I have kind of given up on that, it's just way more convenient and safer to work with plastic. Too many people have been robbed shortly
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it's just way more convenient and safer to work with plastic
You know, I'm really getting sick and tired of hearing this scared-rabbit nonsense from people. Sure, if you're walking around with thousands of dollars in your pocket then you're stupid, but I pull $100 at a time, unless I need more immediately, and I have ZERO WORRIES about carrying the money around with me. People carried cash around for hudreds of years and they didn't all get robbed constantly. You people and you sky-is-falling crap should STFU already. Especially right now, the more you use plastic, t
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Maybe where you live, where I live the crime level is way higher than it was 10 years ago. Let me illu
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Not sure how you come to this conclusion, so now some hacker knows I bought a burger at xyz, how does that expose me more?
Because you used it AT ALL. They hack the payment system anywhere along the data stream, they get your payment information. Functionally similar to credit card skimmers installed anywhere that takes a debit or credit card. When Chipotle got hit that was the tipping point for me, they breached the locations I ate at. Therefore the more you use plastic (or any other electronic funds transfer) the greater your risk some system security breach will put your payment information in some criminals' hands. Use cash
A glimpse of the future (Score:2)
I don't mean the bank - I mean that headline. "Company saves money by replacing people with a machine."
You're going to see variations on that headline over and over from here on out.
A glimpse from the past (Score:5, Insightful)
We've been seeing it since before most of today's newspapers first printed. How many coachmen lost their jobs to a steam locomotive? How many computers [wikipedia.org] lost their jobs to, ahem, computers? How many milkmen had to look for another vocation with the invention of pasteurization [wikipedia.org] process and of refrigerators?
And speaking of "headlines" — you do know, that putting together the printing matrices was a manual process too, don't you? The expression "freedom of the press" and "stop the presses" is still around, even though there neither the actual presses any more — and some publications stopped wasting paper completely [reuters.com]?
Civilization evolves, lamenting the disappearances of some professions is stupid...
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It's going to be different this time. Yeah I know, that's been said before too.
The growth is exponential. The last 100 years or so have been exactly as you describe. Milkmen become refrigerator salesmen. So what?
But there is a ceiling. Name a profession that goes beyond automation engineer. Milkman to salesman to this to that...eventually you run out of space. That is happening, right now. Before much longer there will be robots, the people who build and program and service them...and nothing el
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It was not like that — you'd need, maybe, 1/100 as many salespeople, as there were milkmen. A milkmen had to visit each house, every morning, to deliver the milk. A salesman would visit one once per year...
There is not — not any more than there is a ceiling to the exponent itself. It just keeps climbing...
Artists and poets? Actors? Geisha and hetairai? Teachers and nurses?
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And then all the unwashed masses rise up and kill that one person, destroy his robots and the world falls into another dark age. This has happened before, it will happen again. I just don't want to see it in my lifetime or my children's lifetime (for their sake) because it's going to be a shitfest. So the real question to me, is how do we stop it from happening. Basic minimum wage m
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I don't mean the bank - I mean that headline. "Company saves money by replacing people with a machine."
You're going to see variations on that headline over and over from here on out.
This.
I've been saying this for ages. Whilst wide eyed morons have been salivating over the idea of driverless cars which are decades away from public consumption (if they're ever ready) I've been saying that we're only a short way away from having a great number of professional jobs automated by weak AI. Jobs that are based on applying rules to data like banking, accounting, law, administration, so on and so forth are prime candidates because the one thing weak AI is exceptional at is applying rules to d
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As I hear it, the insurance industry (corporate stuff, not the end-user stuff) has yet to allow remote working, so it'll be a while before they think about automating out the endless lunches and afternoon drinking.
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I'm doing all I can to automate myself out of a job. On the positive side, I'm not letting management know that.
whatever can be automated MUST be automated (Score:5, Insightful)
As it should be. No one becomes a bank-teller, because they like it. Like hundreds of other jobs, it needs to be done, pleasant or not... We are all better off as these jobs are replaced by machinery.
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As it should be. No one becomes a bank-teller, because they like it. Like hundreds of other jobs, it needs to be done, pleasant or not... We are all better off as these jobs are replaced by machinery.
Who is this we you speak of?
Society *can* be better off, but so long as it prepares its social capital (its people) for the shift. We are seeing right now in this country what happens when society does not do that - low-value added jobs are shipped overseas or replaced by manufacturing, causing unprepared people (some of it their fault, some of it not their fault) to see the value of their 10-20-30 years of work experience amount to nothing.
Misery and bitterness ensues, people demanding a scapegoat, be
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The individuals.
Collectivist nonsense. Leave it progressives to stall progress...
You aren't citing anything... Who suffered? How much did they suffer? And why should we care?
For example, suppose, a wonderful pill is invented, that eliminates all diseases. It is fairly simple to manufacture and needs to be taken once in childhood.
Would you seriously argue against its speedy ad
Former customer... (Score:2)
I used to have an account with them, but I switched since they where nickel and diming everything plus they started charging extra for handling cash.
wrong question being asked (Score:2)
Can a machine outperform a human
If you are asking "Can we save a buck by replacing humans" it is likely the decision will backfire and cost you money in the end. Just ask Elon and his new Tent factory
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When automating the question that should be asked is: Can a machine outperform a human
Sorry, but that's stupid. Consider an industrial robot, who cares if it's 1/10th the speed if it costs 1/100th as much? Just set up ten of them and do round-robin. Obviously you should quantify other benefits and drawbacks too, but the simplest way is to convert everything to dollars. Because that's most like what you'll be "producing" in the end, is my business making more or less money with automation. Now it is a problem that computers are dumb and that we don't understand the full complexity of dealing
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Computers make bureaucracies grow, not shrink (Score:2)
Consider, say, the Australian Tax Office in the 1950s when Parkinson wrote his great paper. There would have been no computers at all (possibly some punch card machines). Almost all the work done by hand. Collecting returns, reconciling payments, banking, internal processes, everything.
Consider the Tax Office today, after 60 years of automation. No human hand ever touches the average tax return. What has the efficiency dividend been? Zero. The tax office still consumes about 1% of GDP, just like it d
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The economics of this are simple in principle, complicated in practice: you hire another $1 worth of a productive resource if that will produce $1.01 in additional revenue.
Staffing grows when you automate if, and only if, you have a productive use for it. If you only did the exact same things you did when people were adding up columns of figures by hand, then the staffing levels would always drop when the process of addition was automated. But it turn out there's usually other more useful things you've fr
US Banks have been doing this for years (Score:2)
My local chase branch is all automated kiosks and one or two human tellers. Virtually every other bank has one teller or maybe two available at most other times. Unless you're depositing cash there is no reason to go see a teller since it all can be done at the ATM or with a smartphone.
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first burgers, now bankers (Score:5, Interesting)
"It's cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who's inefficient making $15 an hour bagging French fries," former McDonald's chief executive Edward Rensi said in an appearance on Fox Business Network in May 2016."
"Researchers at Sony’s computer science laboratory in Paris recently put out a set of pop songs composed by an AI system, which scans songs from a database to compose entirely new pieces in certain musical styles"
"It was generated by Heliograf, a bot that made its debut on the Post’s website last year and marked the most sophisticated use of artificial intelligence in journalism to date."
"The San Francisco firm EquBot has launched the first retail ETF to be managed using IBM’s Watson supercomputing artificial intelligence technology."
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
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Heliograf gets sued by Miley Cyrus. Should be fun.
Other way around. Miley Cyrius "performs" the songs made by Heliograf.
Answering Machine (Score:1)
So if you want to bank where you can only get put on hold on a phone machine and will never talk to a human operator, this bank is your choice.
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i've called my bank once in the last 5 years
Only way to stay competative? (Score:1)
I am not sure about elsewhere in the world but where I live, the banks are constantly making huge profits with a large chunk of them reporting increased profits for a number of years running. This just sounds like a way to make even more money rather than just making a decent amount of money.
Banks are obsolete (Score:1)
Ethereum smart contracts can automate most banking services. Its amazing how fast its happening. World feels like its a month before August 1, 1981 when MTV went live. Cryptocurrency is like video and traditional banks are like the Radio Stars.
Atypical area of innovation (Score:2)
Nordea is best known for inventing new and innovative ways for doing money-laundering, tax evasion, and general financial assistance to high-level criminals. Although to be fair, despite their impressive efforts in those areas, they are still not close to leaders in crime-assistance such as Danske Bank.
I guess with everything automated, they can always blame a programming error the next time they get caught. And the next. And...