Fintech
Barclays’ global head of FIG banking says fintechs need 88% fewer programmers thanks to AI
Sabry Salman, global head of financial institutions at Barclays and fintech banking, attended Money2020 Europe, a finance and technology conference in Amsterdam, and learned a few things about the future of fintech as a result.
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Even more significantly, Salman suggests that fintech companies will need fewer developers in the future. Significantly less.
A fintech that hired 40 programmers a few years ago would need to hire just 5 who “write intelligent code and use artificial intelligence,” Salman says. This is a drop of 88%.
If he’s right, the fintech jobs that have been popular alternatives for developers leaving the banking sector could be on the verge of drying up just as banks are also looking to artificial intelligence and automation to reduce their costs.
The main fintechs they’re not necessarily backing Salman’s claim, for obvious reasons, but they’re definitely experimenting with the technology. John Collisonfounder of Bandhe said in a chat in front of the fire last October that the payments fintech is “using and implementing multiple uses of LLM across many parts of the product.” However, he said somewhere else that fintech’s implementation of artificial intelligence is “bottom up”. This means that the company was “get[ting] LLM in everyone’s hands” and allowing them to find their own tricks for efficiency.
However, it is certainly not a case of plug, play and lay (off); Collison stated that “one of the major obstacles to serious business applications is the fact that [LLMS] we just make things up every now and then.” That was Stripe intensification of hiring recently indicates that these issues have yet to be fully resolved.
Big banks aren’t that impressed with programmers these days. Chief Economist at UBS Paolo Donovan call coding a “well stranded” while Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti suggested that timely engineering languages ​​(that is, English) are what young people should study.
The incursion of AI could coincide with another major cultural shift for fintech; his metamorphosis from financial brother. The days of sloppily dressed CEOs could be numbered, as Salman noted, conference attendees had “changed their wardrobes for some smart jackets (and financial bros) vest).”
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