Since Deutsche Bank announced its largest restructuring after the financial crisis on July 7, involving a scale of 7.4 billion euros (about 8.2 billion US dollars) and 65.438+0.8 million employees worldwide, large European banks including Italian Yuxin Bank and Societe Generale (654.38+08.360, -0.43, -2.29%) have also joined the ranks of layoffs.
On July 30th, a wave of layoffs swept across the Atlantic in the United States (3. 150, -0.05,-1.56%): On that day, Citigroup of the United States was also preparing to lay off hundreds of people in its declining trading department.
On August 1 day, Barclays Bank, one of the largest banks in the UK, announced that it would lay off 3,000 employees in the second quarter, accounting for 3.6% of the total number of 83,500 employees at the end of 20 18. Touchard Zarija, its chief financial officer, said that the layoffs were "comprehensive" and not concentrated in a specific area.
This wave of "layoffs" is even more fierce under the superposition of multiple factors such as the decline in trading income on a global scale, the low interest rate or even negative interest rate policy, the negative impact of Britain's "Britain's withdrawal from the EU" and the application of new technologies.
Trading income decreases and then decreases.
The market is not surprised by the "wave of layoffs" in the financial industry.
In fact, the financial report has given the answer. In the past two weeks, major investment banks have released the second quarterly report, and the data shows that it is not optimistic.
On July 24th, Deutsche Bank released the second quarter financial report of 20 19. In this quarter, the company's performance fell short of market expectations, with a net loss of 310.50 billion euros (about 3.5 billion US dollars). Earlier this month, when Deutsche Bank disclosed its restructuring plan, it predicted that the previous restructuring cost would lead to a loss of 2.8 billion euros (3 1 billion dollars) in the second quarter. The actual financial report shows that the scale of the loss is even higher than expected at that time.
The situation of Citibank is not so good: in the second quarter financial report released earlier this month, although the operating income of the quarter increased by 4%, resulting in better-than-expected profits, it was mainly due to the IPO business of the bond trading platform Tradeweb. Excluding the influence of Tradeweb, the operating income of stock trading decreased by 9% and the operating income of fixed income business decreased by 4% year-on-year.
According to Bloomberg News, the trading income of the five largest banks on Wall Street dropped by 8% in the second quarter after dropping by 65,438+04% in the first three months of this year.
According to Coalition Development Ltd, a business data company. ) data, in the first half of this year, the trading income of stocks and fixed income of the world's largest 12 investment banks may be lower than that in the 2008 financial crisis.
At the same time, the world's major central banks have issued signals to maintain loose monetary policy. How to maintain bank profits in the long-term low interest rate environment has become a problem that many financiers have to consider.
Accelerating cost reduction has become the same choice for many big banks.
Take Citibank as an example, the bank's operating expenses in the second quarter fell by 2% to $654.38+005 billion, nearly $654.38+00 billion less than analysts' expectations. On July 15, the chief financial officer of Citigroup said at the financial report meeting that he would continue to cut costs in the second half of the year, and it is estimated that he would save 500-600 million US dollars in the whole year.
Mike Mike Cobart, CEO of Citibank, told the media: "Citi will make every effort to achieve the goal of 65,438+02% return on tangible assets this year."
However, it is still unknown whether Kobart's statement can improve the bank's yield.
AI technology grabs the rice bowl
On the other hand, the entry of AI technology into the transaction may make this layoff different from the past.
It is nothing new for AI technology to enter the financial industry, but recent data show that the impact of AI technology on traditional banking and stock trading application scenarios is gradually deepening.
Today, almost all banks in the world have realized the construction of digital systems, and most of the bill processing work that used to require manual operation has been automated, and the work efficiency has been significantly improved. With artificial intelligence, big data and automated transactions entering the financial industry, many banks are also starting a new round of coping strategies. UBS Group AG recently tracked 49 large banks around the world, saying that major banks such as Barclays, Deutsche Bank and HSBC invested $70 billion in information technology last year, twice as much as in 20 10.
For example, in April this year, Citigroup announced that it had cooperated with Ernst & Young and C&S to develop an advanced risk analysis scoring engine using ai. The project aims to help simplify and review a large number of processes related to global trade transactions, which are time-consuming and highly dependent on manual operation.
In fact, in data research, compared with traditional traders, the advantages of AI technology are obvious: compared with human analysts who rely on analyzing historical data to create models to predict market trends, tireless artificial intelligence obtains books, Twitter messages, news reports, financial data, corporate financial reports and international monetary policies all the time to understand global trends and then predict stocks, bonds, commodities and other financial products.
As early as 2065438+February 2007, Eurekahedge, a hedge fund data service company, said in a research report that from the 23 hedge funds they tracked that used artificial intelligence technology, the performance of artificial intelligence was better than that of human beings: "Trading models established by relying on historical data backtesting (analysts) usually cannot provide good returns in real time."
According to the prediction of Boston Consulting Group, a well-known American consulting firm, in the case of steady development, by 2027, the banking industry will cut 6.5438+0.04 million jobs, a decrease of 22%. Operations such as customer management and service, risk control and audit, marketing and sales are highly standardized, and jobs that do not require high emotional interaction will be replaced by artificial intelligence on a large scale.
"AI replaces traders, just like domestic gas replaces horses, and ATM replaces many bank tellers." David siegel, co-founder of the $35 billion quantitative hedge fund "Two Smart Horses", is even more outspoken. In his view, today, the work of large bank traders does not involve ultra-high value: "They are engaged in very routine work, and computers can do better."
This article is from Time Weekly.
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