Morning Coffee: Goldman Sachs & JPMorgan's 22-year-olds on $100k salaries may go extinct. The banking associate who’s forbidden from playing golf with clients

efinancialcareers.com:

There are some things people can say which are presumably meant to sound reassuring but just aren’t. An example familiar to bankers might be “there are no planned redundancies at present” or “we are not experiencing trouble finding liquidity”. 

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Anyone hoping to work in investment banking is likely to be worried right now that in the words of Jamie Dimon, “artificial intelligence may reduce certain job categories or roles”. They might be reassured to hear JPMorgan spokesman Nick Carcaterra saying that “In the near term, we anticipate no changes to our incoming analyst classes”. Or they might not.

Because apart from anything, in a fast moving field like AI, the “near term” isn’t a very long time. And it seems like many of the jobs ofjunior bankers are really quite close to being replaced. Goldman has a piece of software under development which can “turn text and data collected from thousands of sources into page presentations that mimic the bank’s typeface, logo, styles and charts”. And presumably the robot will never need to “pls fix” any misplaced logos or incorrect fonts. 

Of course, the fact that junior bankers’ current tasks are being replaced isn’t necessarily bad news.  Employers will still need senior bankers, and so they will still need some way to keep that pipeline full. But it might affect the recruitment process, in a manner not necessarily to the advantage of the elite young graduates who currently get paid six figure sums to hang around for three years editing PowerPoints at 3am while looking for private equity jobs.

At present, the deal is that the bank will provide years of expensive training in return for what former banker Gabriel Stengel calls “One