Artificial intelligence will lead to job losses across the banking sector as part of a ‘huge cultural shift’, a senior boss at Santander UK has warned.
Jane Galvin, head of corporate clients at the High Street giant, said ‘less people’ will be needed as the new technology steadily takes over admin jobs.
Speaking at The City UK conference in Leeds, Galvin said the bank was already ‘using a lot more AI tools to help us with credit decision-making, credit writing’.
But Galvin, who previously worked at HSBC, said the bank was still trying to maintain ‘a human touch’ despite its growing use of digital tools.
Inhuman touch: Santander is already using more AI tools in credit decisions
‘There will be less people needed with AI but it’s about involving those people who are in work doing jobs they want to do,’ she said. Galvin added that there would be ‘less’ of certain jobs but there would be other positions ‘being created’ by the technology.
She acknowledged challenges with AI, saying: ‘You have to make sure you can trust what you’re looking at as well.’
Galvin also highlighted cybersecurity risks caused by the rapid growth of AI, saying her concern ‘would be the pace of change – can we move quickly enough?’
‘I am not struggling to sleep over it,’ she said, but added: ‘As much as we’re trying to grow for good, we will be fighting cyber risks attached to dependency on tech.
‘We have collectively as an industry done an awful lot around fighting cybercrime, but it’s the pace we can move.
‘The hacks at Jaguar Land Rover, Co-op and M&S show that when things go wrong, there can be a lot that goes wrong.’
Worried: Jane Galvin says ‘less people’ will be needed
The cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover led to a complete shutdown of production in September and left the firm with a £196 million bill to restart operations. The hack is estimated to have cost the UK economy £1.9 billion.
Separate ransomware attacks in the spring on Marks & Spencer and the Co-op, and an attempted hack of department store Harrods – suspected to have been by a cyber criminal collective group called Scattered Spider – led to empty shelves, cancelled online orders and theft of customer data.
M&S, which was not able to fully resume click and collect until August, estimated the cost to the company was £300 million.
‘It’s about productivity. We’re all learning ourselves,’ Galvin added.
Aside from cybersecurity risks Nick Quin, chief corporate affairs officer at cashpoint provider Link, said the growth of AI use in banking had left him ‘very worried about leaving people behind’.
‘You can’t build all these brilliant new things, keep trust in the industry and achieve growth if millions of people can’t access it,’ he said.
Julian Wells, director of FinTech North, representing financial technology firms in northern England, where the sector employs 20,000 people across 400 companies, raised concerns about the impact of AI on opportunities for young people trying to enter the sector.
He said: ‘I’m worried about young people. Some of the stats show the graduate market is the worst it’s been for ages.
‘I fear we may be building a long-standing problem, the way AI introduction is going.’
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