Last year Barclays Bank confirmed that they have plans to thousands of employees across UK for reducing the number of branches. Recently Lloyds Banking Group announced that they are planning to cut nine thousand employees and shut down 150 branches of their bank to stay focused on the digital automation process. Now Dutch bank ING has confirmed cutting thousands of bank staffs in next three years. Are bank staffs facing redundancy due to digital transformation?
Are bank staffs facing redundancy due to digital transformation?
This is the bad side of having an advanced technology because in the near future, some, if not all, human work will be replaced by automated processes as with the case in several banks where they are cross-cutting the number of bank staffs to cut cost. This action is not only meant to cut cost on the side of the bank but also as a result of bank automation.
Before, when ATM machines are not yet around, banks have clerks where you do your bank transactions like to withdraw or maybe deposit some money. Though banks didn’t totally removed bank clerks when ATMs arrived, their number have been reduced since depositors or bank customers can now withdraw money from the ATM machine as well as deposit money.
Since the computers inside a bank runs a program that assists employees in processing the customers transaction, when the network is improved and the processing software is now advanced, this may decrease the number of bank staffs because of the improved automation provided by the software. With automation, a transaction done by 5 bank staffs may now be accomplished by just 2 or 3 employees.
