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JPMorgan Reshuffles Jobs Under Dimon’s Plan
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon confirmed at an investor meeting Monday what most people have been dancing around: AI is already displacing workers at the world’s largest bank by market cap, and the bank now has formal redeployment plans to shift those employees into new roles. The numbers underneath the flat 318,512 headcount tell the real story—operations staff fell 4%, support staff fell 2%, while client-facing and revenue-generating roles grew 4%. Meanwhile, generative AI use cases doubled this year, fraud processing costs dropped 11%, and software engineer productivity is up 10%. Dimon wasn’t just talking about JPMorgan though—he raised a broader societal question using a pointed thought experiment: if autonomous trucks replaced 2 million drivers overnight, and the next available job pays $25,000 stocking shelves, would you still do it? It’s the kind of question most CEOs dodge. Dimon, working with a nearly $20 billion annual tech budget, apparently feels comfortable enough to ask it out loud
Sources: CNBC
Santander Puts a Number on Its AI Bet: €1 Billion by 2028
Santander’s Executive Chair Ana Botin used the bank’s investor day in London today to lay out the math on their AI ambitions—and the math is big. The bank expects AI and data initiatives to generate more than €1 billion in business value annually by 2028, split between cost savings and revenue growth, as part of a broader strategic plan targeting €20 billion in profit and 210 million customers (up 30 million from today’s 180 million). The efficiency angle is equally aggressive: Santander is closing another 44 UK branches—leaving 244 full-service locations—while leaning into becoming a “global digital bank with branches.” Here’s the thing: €1 billion sounds like a headline number, but for a bank with 200,000+ staff across Europe and the Americas, it’s essentially a down payment on a much larger operational transformation. Whether the branch closures and the AI investments combine to actually hit those targets by 2028 remains to be seen, but Botin is clearly betting the strategic plan on it.
Sources: Yahoo Finance
Deutsche & Goldman Deploy AI to Catch Rogue Traders
Both Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs disclosed today they’re moving beyond rule-based surveillance algorithms and into agentic AI for trading misconduct detection—and the distinction matters. Deutsche Bank is partnering with Google Cloud to build a large language model that identifies anomalies in orders, trades, and market fluctuations, and will extend the same model to monitor communications between traders, sales staff, and client-facing employees later this year. Goldman Sachs, separately, is exploring agent-based AI to analyze trades and flag suspicious signals or unusual market movements. The key difference from traditional systems: these agents autonomously plan and act rather than just surface data for humans to review. Translation—instead of compliance teams wading through flagged alerts generated by static rules, the AI is doing the investigative legwork. Given that trading misconduct fines have cost global banks tens of billions over the past decade, this is less a tech experiment and more a liability management play.
Sources: Bloomberg
Fed’s Waller Details AI Strategy
Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller delivered an unusually candid speech yesterday about the Fed’s internal AI deployment—and it reads less like a policy statement and more like a practical implementation guide. The Fed has built a system-wide general-purpose AI platform for all employees, deployed coding assistants that cut some development tasks from two days to two hours, and embedded AI directly into enterprise workflows across legal, risk, procurement, and operations. One project modernizing hundreds of databases cut completion time by 50% while detecting 30% more issues than previous migrations. Waller’s framing was deliberate: AI use at the Fed is not optional, it’s being built into employee performance goals, and training happens on paid time, not nights and weekends. The bigger subtext here: if the central bank itself is mandating AI adoption and tying it to performance metrics, it’s a signal to every institution the Fed regulates about where the bar is heading.
Sources: Federal Reserve
Don’t blink—the banking Singularity is accelerating.
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