Opimas Report – Workforce of the Future:Transplanting Technology Skill Sets to the Capital Markets 2019-05-16 – “The post-crisis regulatory tsunami that hit the capital markets over the past 10 years has had a major impact on the global industry’s workforce. Despite strong downward pressure on margins, financial institutions embarked on massive recruitment for their risk management, legal, and compliance teams to cope with the complexity of the new regulatory environment.

The result was a profound shift in employee headcount, with a significant increase of 190,000 employees in the overall capital markets workforce between 2010 and 2016 (see Figure 1). This heightened regulatory pressure has mitigated the benefits of increased automation and productivity, which should have allowed a stabilization of the overall workforce and, over time, a reduction in headcount and related expenses.

With regulatory reform now in hand, it is critical that financial institutions shift their focus to improving efficiency to weather the ongoing pressure on margins. The massive adoption of new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics by financial institutions is obviously a means to address this need. The digital transformation of the capital markets is well underway and will accelerate over the next few years. Given this, Opimas is expecting an enormous reduction in staff with more than 400,000 full-time employees lost by 2030.

We believe that this reduction will impact some financial institutions far more than others. Notably, the asset management industry—already under tremendous pressure due to declining management fees and slowing asset inflows—will see some of the greatest cutbacks in the workforce, shedding about one third of its headcount…”