Robots to Cut 200k U.S. Bank Jobs in Next Decade, Study Says | Hacker News Reader

Robots to Cut 200k U.S. Bank Jobs in Next Decade, Study Says

bloomberg.com

111 pointshhs117 comments

A few years ago my bank had a mini-branch in my local chain grocery store. They had a counter and some tellers working behind it. I went to it really often because I was being paid in cash at the time waiting tables. The employees were super nice, they all seemed like they were friends, and I kind of became buddies with them over my time of being a regular customer. Not all bank tellers are pleasant customer service people, but this group just had a good vibe I guess.

One day I try go to the bank and the counter was ripped out and drywalled over, and in its place is a giant ATM machine. It's like an ATM machine on steroids that can do anything with your account. And if you had issues there was a screen on it that would connect you to a call center in Bangladesh or wherever.

Some corporate bank employee was posted next to the machine to explain the change to people who had questions. When I walked up a group of people were standing around listening to him talk, they looked ready to pull out the pitchforks. He assured us that all of the tellers were still employed, they were just working "behind the scenes". I didn't buy that at all, and neither did anyone else.

I continued to use the machine to deposit my cash, but it really sucked. I mean the machine worked absolutely fine. But it sucked to imagine how those tellers felt to be replaced by it.

Now that I don't get paid in cash, I don't even go to a physical bank at all. I deposit checks on my phone in the rare occasion I need to do that.

I'm still not sure how to feel about this. I want to hate it but it feels a little irrational. Maybe all of those tellers went to a coding bootcamp and now make triple their salary designing the ATM machines? Seems like that's how the story is supposed to go. But probably not. Nothing I can do about it anyway.

Honestly if simple banking is handled by automation, isn’t there room for differentiation for more “human” banking that empowers people to understand and use more complex financial instruments?

I don't know. Maybe. I am just talking about the experience of seeing a person's face every day, looking them in the eye, making small talk, interacting with other customers in the bank. That kind of every day stuff has value.

I think we can mourn our losses while also looking forward to the new opportunities created. It doesn't have to be all good or all bad.

Anyway, I'm not sure I completely understand your comment. Are human bank tellers impeding people from using "more complex financial instruments"?

> I am just talking about the experience of seeing a person's face every day, looking them in the eye, making small talk, interacting with other customers in the bank. That kind of every day stuff has value.

Yes, but this value is clearly less than the value provided by automated convenience. Isn't this why you don't go to a physical bank at all?

It seems like the problem is that the people who are "automated away" should be able to get by somehow, even if that means entering retraining or adding a safety net for those unable to transition somehow.

I'm not sure how many viable solutions of substance we'll come us with, considering our day job is programming computers, not crunching intentionally complex economic policy.

Yes, that's called investment, financial advising and wealth management.

It is - but what you're describing isn't available from experts at "every grocery store" scale

> Maybe all of those tellers went to a coding bootcamp and now make triple their salary designing the ATM machines?

Of course, that is where all the unemployed people go.

They probably didn't go into coding.

Some of them will have gone into other customer service roles. It's not like they had to be an expert in banking.

A few may have gone on to more general office jobs with titles like, "Marketing Associate" where they make PowerPoint slides all day.

Some might be in worse jobs now. But, given low unemployment figures, some might well be in better jobs. Not many people aim to spend their life working as a bank teller anyway.

>Not many people aim to spend their life working as a bank teller anyway.

Very good point. But as low-skill customer service jobs go, it's a great stepping stone for someone who is yet to figure out their career path. What happens when all those stepping stones are automated away and we only have high-level jobs left? I think it doesn't bode well for economic mobility.

All this effort into designing these big machines, and banks still won't just give me an api...

People used to be paid to pump our gas, operate the elevator, hand you a towel in the bathroom. A few places still pay people to do this but it’s more of a luxury add-on. Machines made it so that anyone can pump gas, hit an elevator button, or wash and dry their own hands after using the toilet.

Technology progresses and we don’t need experts to cash our checks anymore. If we want to give make-work jobs to people I would prefer they put on puppet shows and read books to kids and the elderly rather than paperwork nonsense at a grocery store bank.

People find new jobs. Losing a job doesn’t mean they are destitute - we have a vibrant jobs market in America. If there are enough people like you who would specifically go to a bank in person because you like talking to people, a bank may do that as a competitive advantage. But it isn’t a necessary thing anymore.

Not to down-play your experience and I empathize, but I would like to see this happen to the DMV. I would love to see 99.99% of DMV functions be a mega-ATM like machine.

In California, the DMV has kiosks to handle basic services. https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/fo/fo_sst

They also partner with some private companies like AAA so members can do some of the basic services in person. I was able to pay my registration and get proof in under a minute at AAA.

Did you know that AAA pays them $10MM/yr to have that access? It is so strange to me. It would be like if I showed up at your house and offered to pay you $25 to mow your lawn.

I do use AAA for some services. They are limited in what they can do with the DMV. It is risky for people with my personality to interact with state government workers.

> Did you know that AAA pays them $10MM/yr to have that access? It is so strange to me.

The drivers are the AAA customers and AAA feels they can bring value to their customers by providing this service. Hopefully DMV uses this money to improve their own service times.

It generally surprises people to learn that the number of bank tellers in the US is up, substantially, since the introduction of ATMs. It is also up since 2000.

(This information is abundantly available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics or you can Google the obvious keywords if anyone wants to keep me honest.)

It's an ongoing process. 10s of thousands of jobs were taken out the last two decades by changes to check processing. Check imaging and clearing by image transmission or conversion to ACH, along with more payments being made by credit cards, resulted in shutting down rather large back end operations that were coding, sorting, repairing, transporting, returning, re-presenting, and including paper checks in customer's statements. A check that processed without any irregularities didn't cost much. However, any errors or unusual processing that a check required cost a lot.

What is needed to really reduce costs is a payment system that eliminates error and irregularities, or which uses AI to handle them.

> What is needed to really reduce costs is a payment system that eliminates error and irregularities, or which uses AI to handle them.

Perhaps some kind of... clearing house, which could be automated?

In the US we have a dozen startups for you to send money to your friends. In most of the world you just do a bank transfer.

I pay my rent and utilities with ACH, but I know people who still don't have that option and are stuck in the dark ages of checks or credit cards with processing fees.

I have accounts with multiple credit unions, and one doesn't permit online ACH transfers and another takes 3+ days to do it. I'm currently trying to consolidate those accounts but even that's a huge hassle. It's nearly 2020 and the form the payroll company my employer uses wants a voided check from me to change where my direct deposits go! I don't have checks and haven't written a personal check in probably 15 years.

We keep scratching our heads looking for that magic future tech solution to our problems (AI! AI for everything!) when we actually just need to fix adoption of the freaking 45 year old standardized solutions right in front of us.

Checks have always been an almost entirely American aberration and a bad solution on all sides. It took us almost 15 years after Europe to adopt chip cards, and we're still swiping in places and almost nobody requires a pin for security. NFC adoption isn't great either outside affluent areas. We're not lacking new financial solutions, we're lacking proper adoption of the solutions we already have and the rest of the world is happy to use.

US payments is a very complex system - there are around 4900 banks and a similarly large number of non-bank players. Managing change is really hard.

Not everyone wants a change. One person's costs are another person's revenues. There are also a lot of managers managing organizations that process fraud, errors, and other irregularities. Costs don't matter if you can charge enough in fees and interest.

In the case of chip cards, the US wasn't about to pay for the French smartcard patents. In general, financial technology is a patent thicket and its best to wait 20 years before implementing new ideas unless you have really positive financial case and can be sure you have the IP locked down.

I find it really hard to believe that the costs of those patents would have been higher, to the US economy as a whole and thus citizens in general, than the costs of sticking to the old inefficient, manual systems for 15 to 20 years. I smell politics.

I suspect there's also the old argument that standardisation takes regulation, and regulation is evil. Government should stay out of this (oh, btw, Government - can you just pay the next tranche of subsidies directly into the executive bonus account. Thanks!).

An earlier transition to chip cards may have reduced costs to the US economy as a whole and thus citizens in general. On the other hand, it would have shrunk the size of the credit card business. It's not politics. It's simply self interest of the key players in the business.

If government had stayed out of it then the cost of patents would not be a factor; the improved system could have been universally adopted and standardized as quickly as it could be reverse-engineered.

Standards actually help somewhat, since standards committees generally require that participants disclose their patents that are essential to practice of the standard and pledge to license them on "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" basis. Of course, there is debate on what is actually FRAND. And other parties that are not members of the standards committee may claim that they own patents essential to the standard. But government recognized standards are better than nothing.

Not sure if this is off topic but here in Canada we also have Interac E-Transfers which is what I use to pay my rent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac_e-Transfer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac

It works quite well.

I've had e-transfers just disappear on me. Sent a friend a few hundred bucks I owed him. The money got debited from my account, but he never received the e-transfer email. Called my bank, they said the money was sent and there was nothing they could do. Called his bank, they said the transfer never appeared and there was nothing they could do. Eventually it got refunded into my account after like a month, but imagine if I was living paycheque-to-paycheque and I was sending off rent.

Other times, I've had e-transfers delayed by a few hours. This is fine if I'm sending off rent, but what if I'm trying to buy something off craigslist? I can't exactly hang out with the seller for a few hours waiting for Interac to get their shit together. This isn't an email issue: Interac acknowledges that transfers may take "up to a day" on their site.

Further, e-transfers cost money to both send and receive at most/some institutions, while cheques are free. E-transfers also can't be scheduled in advance like post-dated cheques can.

Cheques may be antiquated tech but they're still very much useful for certain applications.

ETransfers expire after 30 days if they’re not accepted and are credited back. I’ve had this happen as well.

I do use them to make transfers between banks because they’re virtually immediate rather than several days long pretty regularly these days without fault.

A couple years ago I wanted to send a little over $3K to my brother. He needed it within 24 hours to deposit for a house rental. The only way I could find to get it there that fast was to physically go to the bank and fill out a paper form for a wire transfer, with a $30 fee. I looked at some of those payment startups and their transaction limits were too low.

hmm,,but the us economy and banking sector is also much bigger, paper checks are still popular, and if there are problems a human will still need to review things. The result is that even if some jobs go away due to technology, more jobs total will be create indirectly.

See Figure 1 in https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/2018-December-...

Checks are down to a third of what they were in 2000. The fastest growing type of non-cash payment is debit card, and a lot of these are chip and PIN.

I think a more accurate headline would be "Banks to cut 200k jobs over Robots".

Robots don't take jobs. Managers replace workers.

That's already how everyone is reading the existing headline, though. It's not like anyone is being misled (I don't think)

Those robots can be quite the opportunists with their consciousness and all.

I'm tired of all these robots coming to this country and taking our jobs!

It's important to say it as it is. People tend to treat it as a 'natural' thing, instead of a business decision to cut costs.

Cost reduction sounds like a natural thing for a business in a healthy market economy.

Cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs seems very far from 'natural' or 'healthy'.

Nature is pretty damn cruel and selfish at times. Just because it utterly sucks doesn't mean it isn't natural - similarly healthy has the question of healthy for who and when?

Illness in herd animals is healthy for wolves by making them easier to kill without injury.

The industrial revolution saw major growing pains and destitution but raised standards of living greatly.

Your somewhat patronizing analogy misses the point. If our ultimate goal as a species is to survive and live well, then cutting hundreds of thousands (millions, actually, if you think about the implications of automation in other areas) is in conflict with that goal, thus 'unnatural'.

If the goal is to live well, that has nothing to do with doing jobs that a machine can do. Automation is not in conflict with the goal of people living well. If anything, it's the best tool we have to achieve the goal.

The conflict with the goal of people living well is that we don't want to take wealth from those that have it and give it to those that don't, without making the ones that don't have wealth "earn it".

Otherwise, there is nothing stopping societies from gathering up all the extra profits from automation, and using it to invest in education, healthcare, reducing number of work hours, increasing vacation time, i.e. living well. But we would rather not have that.

I agree that automation should be (and many times do) helping people perform their jobs (and daily tasks). However, those who are 'in charge' financially are actively seeking ways to replace humans in a blind race for maximizing short term results.

In a 'healthy' society, automation should be employed to make humans work less hours and with less risks. Somehow many people think this statement is absurd.

The solution to this are labor laws that result in less work hours for everyone, that apply to all employers. A universal basic income would also help accomplish this. The problem then, however, becomes how do you compete with another country that does offer cheaper labor.

The purpose of work is to do something useful as well. Makework is even more unnatural which is what automatable jobs being kept for the sake of employment only are. That level of waste mounting isn't good for living well as it calls for what is essentially wasted resources and lifetimes.

The true issue is adaptability or lack of it in an economy. The replaced should be doing something actually useful but that process is less than straightforward.

With competition it is a red queen's race unfortunately. It is natural in an emergent sense even though the circumstances are synthetic. If they don't someone else will and even if they held existing jobs sancrosanct they will be displaced by a new party who doesn't have existing jobs to protect.

I agree that that is the case.

Somewhere down the road some kind of intervention will be necessary, as too much will be on the line.

We don't get to choose whether we're in the race or not, but we do get to choose how we run it. I get the "these are forces at work, not humans" argument, but I think it underestimates the solution space available to the humans in the scenario (to be fair, they probably do too).

Even more accurate "Banks to cut 200k jobs over chatbots"

Software agent aka bot is not a robot. Robot is physical device. ATM is more robot-like than chatbot.

Small tweak: Executives at the behest of shareholders instruct managers to replace workers.

Expand shareholders to people with savings such as 401k, 529, IRAs, HSAs, defined benefit pensions, etc.

There were probably articles very similar to this written when ATM's first bengan rolling out in the 60/70s.

And maybe they were correct.

And they were right. ATMs displaced tons of jobs. Banks used humans for other jobs and that’s why banking industry employment kept going up even with all these robots doing, better, the job previously done by humans.

And not minimum wage jobs. Tellers aren't at the high end of the pay scale, but not at the bottom either.

I imagine it's hitting the jobs a step or two above the tellers as well.

> all these robots doing, better, the job previously done by humans.

I don't know if you use ATM's a ton, but when it's the only option you have for interacting with your bank, it's pretty terrible, because your options for if something goes wrong is to call a number and get redirected to some general call center in probably some other country and wait while some minimally paid chap who couldn't care less about your problems follows a script and then when they can't figure it out, tell you they will file a ticket and get back to you in 3-7 business days.

I agree software and robots can do the job better with the caveat that you are using the well trodden majority use case. The moment something goes wrong (software bug, does the wrong thing, etc), or you are trying to do something slightly different, good luck.

Get a better bank. This comes up too often on HN. Prioritise customer service. Don't pick the bank that offers slightly better rates but gives you the run around on every little thing, especially for day-to-day services.

My bank (First Direct) picks up only barely after the ringing tone starts, and the person you're talking to is an expert. They have no branches, so everything must be solved on a phone call (or you can use their web site of course). Nobody needs or wants branches, especially branches that are only open when you've got better things to do.

I bank with USAA. I’ve never been in a branch in my life and they are amazing.

Their support is really good and always human.

I also bank with Citi, BA, and Chase. They have tellers and suck so much.

The current generation of bank branch tellers aren't making much more than minimum. In some cases just talking to the teller will generate a fee against your account if you don't use the ATM.

Wells Fargo employees had to generate more and more service fees to justify their employment. That was what came of the investigation a few years ago. If they weren't opening X new accounts every month they would be terminated.

Most of the ATM's I've used only give $20 bills. Until that changes, Tellers will still be needed (where are you going to get your $2 bills, for example).

It’s not just tellers getting replaced though, it’s brokers/salespeople/traders - jobs that were once coveted.

I foresee a future where every major bank just gives their clients (hedge funds, asset managers) an API that they can call to electronically trade securities, rather than a phone number they can call. This is already in progress (see Tradeweb)

At the end of the day, when you’re competing with 6 other banks to offer a better bid-offer spread, you need to cut costs any way you can, and that means cutting humans.

Moreover, as sales and trading becomes more commoditized, all the salespeople get the axe. No need to take clients out to expensive lunches, etc.

There are usually two arguments presented when someone says software and robots are coming for many jobs - first, this has been happening in history, so nothing new. Second, the people who lose their jobs will move on to different and hopefully better jobs.

Both are true, but this time the scale and speed is the difference. Even in software which is considered a safe job, I am much more productive today than just a few years ago because of better tools, third party services, libraries etc. We are able to do a lot more with a lot less with every passing year.

This time it is different and it is not going to be pretty, unless we take a step back and look at ideas like Universal Basic Income etc.

One other mindset that is quite difficult to change (at least in the U.S) is tying a person's self-worth to the amount of hard work they put in.

> Second, the people who lose their jobs will move on to different and hopefully better jobs.

They do move to different jobs, but most likely not better ones. An observable consequence of automation is to put pressure on the 'labor market', leaving fewer and fewer opportunities with increasing requirements for job seekers.

Or, maybe there are just lots of inefficiencies in the banking sector, and more efficient/affordable banking is good for almost everybody, especially for the demographics of people who are currently underbanked.

Maybe it can be both that and another road to the middle class closing off for young people aiming to get a job in the services sector.

Yea, I am working in this sector at the moment (banking and automation) and I can tell you compared to say, a tech company, they are very very far behind. Although some banks like Goldman and JPMogran, are lightyears ahead of the competition in this space. This is the consequence of having non-technologist in tech management roles for the past 50 years, and typically no technologists on the exec. boards either.

You honestly believe that lower banking costs will transfer to clients?

If the costs of servicing the unbanked can be reduced to be less than the expected revenue, why wouldn't someone serve that market? Maybe Chase Bank doesn't want them but if they can be made profitable, some bank will want that money.

Yes. We’re all used to free checking now, but it wasn’t always that way. No fee credit cards with cash back are also a result of competition and lower costs.

I don't think free checking is a thing anymore, unless you are grandfathered in.

Shop around - it's a competitive market. Many checking accounts with an initial deposit of less than $1000 or confirmed direct deposit are free and have no minimum balance. Some (TD for example) will even pay $150 - $300 to open an account after a few direct deposits.

And I bet most of us will still be working a 5 day week, despite all the savings from automation.

This doesn't have to be the case. It is up to new business owners to decide how much their employees should work, what they should make and how often they should take vacations. Anyone can set an example at any time. As far as I know there is nothing to stop anyone from setting their own standards for fewer working days, shorter days, better pay, more vacations.

It’s also up to the law

Is there a law that says I can't pay you a full time's salary for 20 hours a week instead of 40?

The law of competition. Assuming that your employees are less productive overall on a 20 hour week, the competition paying get a 40 hour week gets more done for their money and thus are cheaper for their customers.

There are a lot of assumptions in there. Getting everybody to work 168 hour weeks (24x7) seems like it should be even better, but it turns out that as you get close to that workload your employees are less productive. Fatigue will ensure your useful productivity is less than someone working somewhat lesser hours who is allowed to sleep. (I'm going to assume you require your people eat at their desk, otherwise starvation will kill them) You also lose because if there is even a rumor that other companies allow their people who have a life they will quit, and replacing people cost productivity.

We can take the opposite extreme: you work 1 hour per week. At this point your productivity is very low because you can never get "in the zone", and in fact your entire hour at work is spend just trying to remember what you do.

Someplace in the middle is the sweet spot. 20 hour weeks may be worth it - perhaps you can pay your people half as much and still give them as much income as they want, and still get the productivity you need to compete. Perhaps you can justify paying as much for 20 hours as your competitors pay for 40 hours because you employees enjoy that extra time and so they don't quit - you get better productivity because you don't have to teach them new things.

Each company needs to figure it out. in general society has settled on 40 hour weeks as a good number. There is no legal law making it best, but considering the compromises it isn't a bad number.

And people are used to what they're used to.

Would a lot of people prefer to work 4 days a week all other things being equal? Sure. But a lot fewer would be interested in earning 80% (or maybe less when the cost of benefits are taken into account) of their salary especially given that their partner/friends/kids/etc. would probably not have that time off.

And working 5 days a week most weeks just seems pretty normal. As you say, Western society seems to have settled on that as a fairly reasonable number with the main variation in how much vacation people get on top of that.

>in general society has settled on 40 hour weeks as a good number. There is no legal law making it best, but considering the compromises it isn't a bad number.

It might be a bad number going forward, considering the widening income/wealth divides.

It's not about setting an example. Companies optimize for profit and shareholder return. We aren't just waiting for one visionary company to show all the others that it's possible to keep the same number of, pay them the same, and have them work less hours.

We are waiting for regulation of automation to spread the benefit.

We could fund a UBI or better unemployment by taxing some % of the total benefit of automation.

It's not up to businesses, it's up to the government. Businesses have to compete with one another. Hence the need for standards that apply to everyone, so the game is being played with certain requirements, such as environmental, food safety, work hours, etc.

It's a system of perpetual indentured servitude based largely on factors you had no control of by your birth and have virtually no control of after.

As long as most peoples' basic needs are met and there's a carrot in front of them promising someday they'll have it better/easier, people will keep on running towards that carrot and maintain the status quo.

Unless you want your standard of living to stagnate, yes you do.

South Africa recently avoided a country-wide banking sector labour strike [1]. The reason for the strike would have been to protest against retrenchments in the industry [2]. I suspect that we'll see an increase in white-collar workers striking in the future.

[1] https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2019-09-26-pro...

[2] https://ewn.co.za/2019/09/25/busa-banking-sector-mass-action...

Financial instruments (including money) is fundamentally just data. There is no reason to keep maintaining a large labor force in the sector.

The first wave of labor downsizing in banking came from the closure of retail branches. The second wave of downsizing, I suspect will come projects like Libra or CBDCs [1] where issuers bypass banks (now reduced to a redundant middleman) and reach users themselves.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-10/why-china...

I wish they'd stop calling computer programs "robots". If it doesn't go "clang" when I hit it with a spanner it's not a robot.

Also, the 'clang' robots that come to mind have a certain amount of self-reliance. The 'non-clang' robots (which are basically macro's running in VMs), stop working as soon as an unexpected popup appears, the software is upgraded or the products on one page are suddenly on two.

No, the 'non-clang' robots are an indication of the software engineers' gross failure to properly integrate and standardize data exchange between solutions.

The article is referring to contact center (support) automation with this kind of thing, which is a pretty far cry from Selenium scripts.

https://cloud.google.com/solutions/contact-center/

I didn't read the article but skimmed. Guilty as charged <blush-emoji> Thought it was about RPA (Robotic Process Automation).

Speaking from knowledge of the rhetoric in the Norwegian banking sector of the last few years (which is very automated), "robots" in the banking sector has referred to three things: Chatbots that don't work, macros that click around in a user interface to perform repetitive backoffice or customer support tasks, or plain old software that automates business processes in a scalable manner.

Not surprisingly, only the last of these stand the test of time, and most organizations that jump on the bandwagon will realize that they need to hire more software engineers and automate their business processes at the root.

For some, this is a long and painful realization. I spent six months trying to convince the appointed leader of a "robotization" initiative that what they were doing is actually software engineering, and that involving developers at an early point would be a better use of their money. They eventually made the mistake themselves, and got their own developers 18 months later.

Maybe 20 years from now, we will have technologists on the board and in executive positions at these companies, and these decisions can be made in an adult manner.

I am surprised they don't just call it AI.

Some robots feel like human flesh. They cost a bit more, but they are getting more real every year. I would be ok with interacting with one of those robots, provided it has a sense of humor.

It will interesting to see what happens to Manhattan. In the last decade or so, many local restaurants and shops have closed, only to be replaced by a seemingly endless stream of bank branches. Ideally, the loss of bank tenants with deep pockets will force landlords to lower prices enough to bring back some more traditional establishments.

Banks have been opening more physical locations? In the last decade, in Manhattan? What on Earth for?

Could be catering to powerful and wealthy (private banking) or mixing with investment banking advisory activities (not native to NY so just guessing). Not all banking is equal, when enough money is in stake personal touch is still seen as an advantage from both sides

Feels like a natural part of the late stage of the credit cycle (FOMO).

Read this somewhere: in 1999 risk meant bumping into someone and finding out he/she makes more money daytrading stocks. In 2002 it meant owning stocks.

Even in my medium sized city I see banks opening all the time. I can only assume they are for older people who have not moved to online banking. I think there is also this outdated thought that banks project stability with a lot of branches.

It's really not that older people can't figure out how to use an ATM. It's that people especially those with more money--many of whom are indeed older--sometimes need other services like notaries or non-standard things that you want to discuss with a person.

These are often easier to handle when you can walk into a branch in person. I just had something semi-complicated I needed to do with my brokerage a few months ago and it was very nice to walk into an office and get it taken care of in 10 minutes.

(That said, a lot of the real estate is rather unnecessary. I do have other financial folks who I deal with regularly who I have never met in person.)

I think banks make a lot of money off private wealth management. It's probably worth their while from a visibility and convenience perspective to have many locations available to gain/poach clients.

The overall trend is slightly down for bank branches [1] but only slightly. I expect that a lot of banks (and this probably applies to things like cellular phones as well) find that having retail visibility that seems, from a strictly utilitarian aspect, almost comically oversized compared to the actual need to still be a win.

I get it to some degree. I very rarely need a physical bank/brokerage branch but it's handy now and then so my choice of vendor for a largely commodity service is at least somewhat biased by retail availability.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DDAI02USA643NWDB

Many of the locations are a block of ATMs secured behind a door. Your ATM card is required for entry, and occasionally there’s a security guard who looks like he could be a bouncer at a club. Or, at least, that’s the majority of the Chase locations near me. TD Bank appears to actually have people working in customer facing roles.

My credit union is an bunch of ATMs for most things. However those "bouncers" are notary publics (as I discovered when I needed that service a few months ago), can answer deep questions about various things, and help with loan applications. Need to get cash - the ATM is better at counting than the humans ever were.

In the last decade, in Manhattan? What on Earth for?

Partly to upsell more complex products like investments and mortgages, but mainly because surveys have shown that wealthier demographics will only use online banking if there is a branch nearby “in case”. The cost of a branch is dwarfed by the additional revenue from those customers.

Source: used to work for a bank that did this, and those were the reasons.

Until those people--the ones who won't manage their investments on a web page--start to die off.

Then maybe all those branches will start to die back for fewer rare services that truly need in person presence.

I'm one of those people that require an "in case" bank nearby. I've had to visit the bank in person multiple times in the past year because they kept screwing up paperwork. In my experience, trying to deal with those situations on the phone has a high likelihood of both taking a long time and not actually resolving it.

Plus I have a safety deposit box at my bank for important documents.

Plus I have a safety deposit box at my bank for important documents.

Did you see this article and discussion about safe deposit boxes? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20545276

I hadn't seen it. I'll go read it. Thanks

There's a joke in my Tri-State area hometown that whenever a restaurant or store closes it's replaced by a bank. Glancing at my town via Google Maps I can see 14 banks (not including ATMs).

Bank branches have been popping up like mushrooms, it is a considerable fraction of all the commercial construction around me.

I don't know who these bank branches serve, as they are not ever open during hours that anyone with a job could get in to them.

And in the remainder of the world this has already happened.

In Australia you are lucky to find a bank with real people working in it, they have mostly been replaced by Automatic Teller Machines (ATM's) and if you do, they will normally be working at selling you insurance or investments.

so this remains the threat of several decades ago (i.e. chatbots are not new) of losing customer services jobs to human pastiches? Is this something new or just a continuation of self-service checkouts and automated payment options?

I still feel like there are many human-contact roles where an AI isn't going to cut it.

you're already seeing a pushback against "telemedicine", with services promising a real human doctor/pharmacist to help you.

Chatbots are almost universally subpar; there's been a lot of work at trying to marry them up with natural language processing and other whizz-bang AI techniques, but still, you get down to the nitty gritty that it's a lot of work to design and implement something that's more than just a glorified IVR tree. Very few organizations will have the time and resources to make a decent experience.

I frankly prefer a chat(bot or not) because I have a transcript of what has been discussed. Also, it's kinda fun to guess if it's a bot without offending. This is a real excerpt at the end of a helpful chat with Comcast: guest_ > You seem really nice. I've read about computer programs that can simulate nice people. Are you really a person? Cecilia > yes, i am guest_ > Who won the superbowl? Cecilia > i'm not familiar with it , im sorry

Wrote this as part of a recent article, "The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2022, 75 million roles may be eliminated due to technological changes, including automation. However, other advances may result in the development of 133 million new roles requiring new skills."

Source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/skills-jobs-investing...

I'm surprised this hasn't happened sooner.

Banking as a profession relies on a fairly strict set of rules , most of which can be automated. Thus, the leftover role of the banker is to navigate the regulatory requirements within the the scope of the automated task.

As well as the programmers to automate it.

I assumed it would be about RPA - robotic process automation. It reduces time spent in repetitive desktop activities.

Time to go back to subsistence farming. Heck I should create a start up for subsistence farming as a service

Before you thought it up, 5 people already did it:

https://yourstory.com/2019/03/faas-agritech-startup-farmers-...

I don't understand, it seems like these are just rental services for expensive farming equipment? Are we just calling rentals [Blank] as a Service now? Maybe Enterprise should change their business model to Cars as a Service.

It would if it could, no doubt about it. Who knows what kind of technological advancements we will see.

I will tell you what I see today. Salesmen selling 'culturally aware fuzzy logic' that promises to automate just about anything and let leadership just read beautiful dashboards. Depressing stuff. And it sells too.

And 200k over a decade? Wake me up when AI replaces CEOs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com