Automation and its impact on the Indian BFSI sector: A study of key trends and outcomes

Abstract

Amid a lot of buzz behind automation replacing jobs int he next decade, there is also a wonderful body of research suggesting a shift in the nature and kind of work besides a beacon of hope of surplus job creation due to automation1 . In The Future of Jobs report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) posits that breakthroughs in technology are constantly shifting the contours between tasks performed by humans that by machines so much so that rapidly developing economies such as India, China and Brazil might see an eradication of up to 70% of its workforces in the manufacturing sector. The good news is that many scholars argue the onset of a virtuous migration from unskilled jobs to more respectable and well-paid jobs if this transition is managed well by global leaders. A report published by McKinsey and Company captures these occupational shifts by 2030 in terms of parameters others than direct robotization, but also in terms of co-related factors such as stepped-up investment in technology, infrastructure, buildings and energy, and the marketization of various job profiles which are currently underpaid and unformalized2 . The study conducted across 11 major occupational fields ranging from creatives to managers, engineers to builders and professionals such as accountants to people employed in highly customer-interaction dependent fields such as personal care, shows that for India, the percentage change in labour demand at the mid-point of automation-adoption is positive for each of the 11 sectors studied. For countries like Germany, Japan and USA, however, the percentage change is negative for most fields of work, suggesting the larger capacity of developing countries to accommodate professional migration. Another study done by the WEF3 argues that the playbook for accelerated adoption of technology across industries would include i. intelligence, ii. flexible automation and iii. connectivity. A probable reason as to why in the last half-decade the predicted fears of job displacement haven’t caught attention is lack of resources needed, high cost of scaling and difficulty in justifying the need of automation in the face of short-term impact. Debabrat Mishra, a partner at Deloitte India shows an important data-point in the banking industry which was deemed to fire its workforce. “ATMs were supposed to do away with cashiers (at banks) but both coexist today. In fact, ATMs created more jobs in the backend in the form of call centres.” In this study, we leverage the WEF toolkit to find out and analyse the effect of technology on recent job trends in the retail banking industry, borrowing on industrial data sources and annual reports of public and private sector banks to build and qualitatively test our hypothesis around the net shift in workforce in the next half a decade.