JPMorgan led hires in the AI space across the global banking industry during the first quarter of the year, in a sign of the technology’s growing importance to US lenders compared with their international counterparts.
The bank, the US’s largest by assets, accounted for around 400 data and AI job offers in the first three months of the year, equivalent to 20 per cent of global banking job offers in the field posted by 40 top global lenders during the period, according to research published by data platform Darwin X.
North American banks on average posted twice as many job openings in data and AI than their European counterparts, the company’s findings show.
“In North America, established banks [...] are aggressively expanding their existing talent pools. In contrast, European banks that are demonstrating the most rapid growth often start with smaller talent pools [...] and are actively striving to catch up with industry leaders,” the report said. JPMorgan had a $15.3bn tech spend last year, with BNP Paribas and HSBC spending around $7bn and $6bn, respectively, Darwin X said, citing bank websites and industry research.
Banks’ proportion of data and AI human capital continues to vary, ranging from 0.4 per cent to 3.2 per cent of the total workforce. And while ING, ANZ, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia lead rankings for the proportion of the workforce focused on data and AI, JPMorgan, which last year introduced a chief data and analytics officer to its operating committee, has the largest talent pool specialising exclusively in AI, both in absolute numbers and relative to its workforce.
Darwin X forecasts that banks’ data and AI workforces will grow by 17 per cent this year. AI talent remains the smallest yet fastest-growing segment — comprising 4,000 of the total 50,000 data and AI professionals — and is projected to grow 38 per cent in the coming year, outpacing all other areas.
Meanwhile, banks are accelerating their technology spending overall, with a compound annual growth rate of 9 per cent predicted over the next three years. Within the next five years, the total overall tech spend in the banking sector is expected to reach $1tn, with spending on generative AI estimated to reach $60bn, compared with $6bn this year.
The weight of banks’ legacy systems continues to be their “biggest technology challenge”, the report said, adding that strong data and AI human capital bases requires banks’ expansion of data analysts, data engineers, data scientists and AI specialists.
“Initially, banks ramped up their recruitment of data scientists and analysts but soon recognised the need for robust data engineering to support these roles,” the report said, anticipating a 26 per cent increase in data engineers in the coming year.
