Clearly, artificial intelligence (AI), and its numerous sub-disciplines, will prove to be a differentiator for banks and critical to their future success. As such, many lenders are investing heavily in AI talent, which is central to the pending AI transformation of the banking industry.
Evident, a membership-based intelligence platform, has launched live trackers of AI-related talent activity in North America and Europe’s largest financial institutions and payment providers, which identify what roles banks are hiring for and in which locations. It also offers a deep-dive into the current AI talent profile and explores the dynamics of the AI talent ecosystem in the sector.
In its recent AI Talent Report, it found that the 60 largest North American and European banks and payment providers employ at least 46,000 people in the “AI and data core”, including AI development, data engineering and governance and ethics roles, with as many as 100,000 global banking roles, including implementation, quants and model risk involved in bringing AI to market.
In the face of rationalisation efforts, including job cuts and hiring freezes, these institutions are continuing to invest in AI talent, with AI and data core net staff numbers increasing by 4% between October 2022 and March 2023.
JPMorgan Chase has the most AI staff, according to the report. The US bank employs more than 10% of the total number of AI staff and continues to accelerate. Between February and April 2023, it advertised for around 20% of all the AI and data core jobs posted by banks. However, Capital One is the leading bank on AI talent density, with the highest proportion of its staff working in AI.
“Density is critical as a way to understand how seriously AI is being taken across a bank,” said the report. “The greater the density of AI development talent, the more AI-mature the bank should be.”
In Europe, BNP Paribas ranks fifth in terms of overall number of AI and data core staff, and ABN Amro and ING are second- and third-placed banks for talent density, respectively. Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas and Barclays are all in the top five for current AI recruitment.
In terms of where AI talent is most numerous, New York comes out on top as the global centre, followed by London, Toronto, Bengaluru and Paris.
Interestingly, poaching from other banks is the largest source of AI talent for banks. While the US banks have a small net inflow, partially at the expense of UK banks, most poaching is within markets rather than between them. Wells Fargo, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), BNP Paribas and HSBC lead by net inflows in their respective markets.
North American banks, such as JPMorgan and RBC, have led on building research teams to spearhead their AI strategy, at least partially based on inspiration from big tech firms, like Google.
But despite the explosion of interest in generative AI, fewer than 2% of recent AI development job descriptions explicitly referenced skills in generative AI, large language models or ChatGPT. The research also found little evidence that banks are increasing investment in responsible AI talent, even as regulation looms. Just two among the largest 23 banks explicitly recruited for responsible AI roles between February and April 2023.
Evident has been able to track gender diversity in the industry. Its research found that the level of diversity across the banks varies – typically between 20% and 30% of banks’ AI-related staff are female – with the North American banks generally outperforming the European banks. According to the report, the banks with smaller teams tend to perform better on gender diversity than the firms with larger workforces.
It also found that gender diversity varies by role type. Governance and ethics roles have the highest proportion of female talent at over 40%, while implementation is around 20%.
Staff leaving banking are more likely to end up at a big tech company, than to come from there. Of the five leading employers of ex-banking staff, three are tech firms: Amazon, Google and IBM.
Joy Macknight is editor of The Banker. Follow her on Twitter @joymacknight
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