‘Uber’ threat to bank jobs

BANKS are facing their ‘Uber’ moment as up to half of jobs could be replaced by technology in the next decade, the former boss of Barclays has warned.

Antony Jenkins – who was sacked in the summer – issued a stark warning to more than one million people who work in the UK’s financial services sector, James Salmon reports.

He said a ‘technical revolution’ in banking could echo the devastating impact the soaring popularity of the Uber mobile phone taxi app has had on cab drivers around the world.

Britain’s biggest banks have already invested huge amounts of money in technology to cater for the dramatic rise in people who want to bank online or on their smartphones rather than visit High Street branches, hundreds of which have been closed.

But in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s in Business programme, Jenkins said the big lenders will struggle to compete with financial technology – or ‘fintech’ firms – in future. They include start-up companies like Atom Bank, the UK’s first mobile-only bank.

Jenkins said: ‘The challenges that the banks face is going to result in a rather significant reduction in the number of people employed in the traditional financial services sector and, for example, the number of branches, and i estimate that there will be somewhere between a 20pc and 50pc reduction over the next ten years.’

The comments echo the recent warning from the Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane that up to 15m people in Britain – half of the country’s workforce – could be replaced by robots over the next twenty years.

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