The consulting analytics firm, ‘SAS Institute’, believes automation will render half of all jobs in finance in Norway redundant.
Bank managers believe the analysis is realistic. The CEO of Sparebank 1, Finn Haugan, doesn’t rule out the possibility that he could manage with half the bank’s present staff, which currently stands at 630 employees, reported Dagens Næringsliv newspaper
‘Within a few years, it will be possible to run this bank with 350 full time employees, and that is a possibility I cannot ignore’, said Haugan.
According to the SAS Institute, it will be the routine jobs that will disappear first.
They said, ’If we make everything automated, including the categories of injury, life insurance, brokerage, credit, consumer loans, financial services and more, the sum of the jobs lost due to automation could reach 25,000 by 2025’.
‘This corresponds to half of all jobs in the Norwegian financial sector’ wrote Espen Eide in an article contributed to Dagens Næringsliv. Eide heads the department of financial services at the SAS Institute.
In late January, DNB bank’s chief executive, Rune Bjerke, made it clear that he expected to cut the number of bank employees in DNB within five years, from 10,000 to 5,000.
Source: NTB scanpix / Norway Today
