Working in asset management and other financial jobs? Looking forward to a long career? Forget about it. Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are coming for you (think robots) and everything you do. We are talking about a whole bunch of positions (230K?) in ALL sectors of the financial sector that can, will be and are being eliminated starting now......even yesterday. Here is some great insight that may keep you up at night and probably dreaming of rogue robots.
(Bill Taylor/CEO)
'Artificial intelligence is picking up pace in financial services and the effect on jobs could be devastating.
230,000 jobs could disappear by 2025, according to research from consulting firm Opimus, and if you think this is confined to easily-automated back office roles, think again. High-paying front office jobs could just as easily be replaced by a machine – we’ve broken out which jobs and why...
Asset Management – 90,000 jobs will disappear
Asset managers have been struggling to justify their high fees anyway, particularly as ETFs and other passive investment strategies hoover up more investors. What’s more, human portfolio managers have been unable to maintain an edge as hedge funds and long-only asset managers alike draw on increasingly large external data-sets to inform investment decisions.
“AI will just see a reinforcement of the trend away from gut feeling and human portfolio managers and towards a quant-approach using large datasets,” says Axel Pierron, co-founder of Opimus, and author of the report.
Steve Cohen is already adopting an AI approach at Point72, ramping up its internal quant fund and scrutinising the “DNA of trades” in order to codify and replicate an elite PM using a machine. Raffaele Savi, head of developed markets at BlackRock’s scientific active equities team, believes that the machines are already beating humans in asset management and that the sector is set to tip into AI in a big way.
“Unlike quant algorithms, which tend to follow similar strategies, AI will add a competitive edge because it will draw from various different external datasets,” says Pierron. “Human judgement is still needed to interpret the data, or simply to unplug the AI when it fails to deal with market events. But the ratio of humans to machines will reduce dramatically....”'
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