While many in the financial services industry are dreading the day that AI technology becomes advanced enough to render broad swaths of the human workforce obsolete, Deutsche Bank’s John Cryan ironically sees the technology as something that might help him save his job.
The leader of the biggest German lender has been tasked with putting the bank back on sound footing, regaining market share and – of course – reining in costs, including the bank’s bloated headcount. DB has 97,000 employees worldwide, about double the number of employees at many of its European peers.
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And as the bank has made about half of the 9,000 cuts promised by Cryan in a five-year restructuring plan, the CEO told the Financial Timesthat machine learning and automation technology could help him cut tens of thousands of additional jobs, particularly in the bank’s back office.
Deutsche has made about 4,000 of the 9,000 job cuts promised under a five-year restructuring plan announced in late 2015. Mr Cryan said many of the additional cuts would come through using technology to boost efficiency in the bank’s processes.
‘There we’ve got the most to gain,’ he said. ‘We’re too manual, which can make you error-prone and it makes you inefficient. There’s a lot of machine learning and mechanisation that we can do.”
Mr Cryan said the ratio of front office, revenue-generating staff, to back office people who keep the bank’s systems running, was ‘out of kilter’ at Deutsche.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Nov 9, 2017.
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