The waves of technological changes and innovations are sweeping across finance industry. These profound transformations, ranging from famous FinTech to lesser known RoboFinance along with innovations happening in other industries, would fundamentally change the landscape of finance industry and influence workers at financial sectors.
First, the number of jobs available in finance industry would continue to decrease. Improvements in technology have eliminated the need for the physical presence of the financial intermediators, making it possible for customers to directly address their financial needs through other P2P platforms and mobile banking. As a result, the retail banking branches and ATM machines have been disappearing swiftly. Even some of financial sectors—such as trading and sales department—which are generally thought to be difficult to be replaced by machines have been experiencing significant downsizing, as robots and programmed algorithms replaced human traders and executed orders on their own.
As the number of jobs available at finance industry continues to dwindle, smaller number of specific jobs would survive. Some of jobs at banking sector that are likely to survive are those that require human interactions which cannot be replaced by machines. For example, relationship managers that focus on establishing and maintaining long-lasting relationship between corporate clients and banks would not easily be dismissed because clients would prefer to talk to and rely on human to robots when addressing their financial problems.
Others might include CEOs and high ranked decision makers at financial firms simply because they are hard to remove and society would still believe that some critical decision making positions must still be retained by human. Also, banks that mainly operated in matured advanced economies would desperately seek ways to expand their business into emerging markets, where there is still a room for economic growth. Some global banks and Korean banks have been aggressive in expanding their banking services into South East Asian nations as economic activities have slowed down domestically. For example, Standard Chartered has 90% of its business operating in the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Africa, and derives most of its revenues from these regions. Shinhan Bank has also made inroads into Vietnam and Indonesia and established their retail businesses. Gone are the days when recruitment at banking service sectors looked for candidates who are conservative and attentive to details. Jobs at banking service sectors in the future are likely to require more active salesmanship in foreign, emerging markets and thus require fluency in local foreign languages and understandings of other culture compared to the past.
In addition, finance companies would also need to be very quick to adapt to changes happening in the real world. Insurance companies, for example, would face radical changes in automobiles market. Autopilot technology, in which human do not need to take control of driving and cars follow programmed driving orders, would drastically reduce the number of accidents resulting from human drivers to nearly zero, and as a result, insurance companies would lose traditional opportunities for profits arising from individual contracts. However, they would shift their focus to business insurance because future accidents would primarily happen from malfunctioning of automobiles rather than human errors, resulting in a few large scale business insurances rather than many small individual contracts. Companies that are rapid to take advantage of new opportunities are likely to survive while those that stick to the past are not.
In conclusion, the finance industry as a whole would undergo revolutionary transition periods. The essential function of providing financial assistance to companies and individuals would not easily disappear, but the mode in which financial industries operate would be radically different from the past. Only a small number of experts would remain competitive enough to win jobs as financial companies struggle to look for profits in emerging markets and adapt to the technological changes. As an individual, it would be extremely important to anticipate technological breakthroughs and innovation that are happening in various industries, and be equipped with tools and capacity to analyze how these changes would impact finance industries.