Morning Coffee: The safest job in banking is getting riskier. Barclays’ optimists could be in for a disappointment.
If there’s one job in banking that might be considered immune to the business cycle, compliance would be it. It’s the one true secular growth industry – year in, year out, there is more regulation to comply with, and therefore more need for people to check that compliance is happening. And although it’s not considered one of the better paid specialisms, there is always the possibility of coming across some really bad misbehaviour and cashing in through one of the extremely lucrative whistleblower programs.
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Up until now, it’s also been one of the areas which was least exposed to technological change. In other areas of the bank, people might be tempted to trade off cost against performance, for routine tasks at least. But compliance is an area where one relatively tiny error can cost millions. So although there has been a little bit of outsourcing and offshoring round the edges, compliance people have, in general, been able to read articles about the new advances in Large Language Models with amused curiosity, rather than wondering whether they’re going to be replaced.
Perhaps no more . There are now quite a lot of “RegTech” and “ComplianceTech” startups in the FinTech space. And although none of them are exactly gaining traction yet, executives are beginning to get AI-curious. According to Alan Carlisle, head of compliance at a payments company, the number of outreach contacts he’s been fielding has gone up by a factor of three in the last six months. Sooner or later, artificial intelligence will be knocking on the door in compliance too.
This probably doesn’t mean that mid-office jobs will be at risk. The tasks that are being automated – at this stage – are
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