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Paging @2rafa or anyone else who can explain to me what an investment banking analyst actually does: AI is coming for Wall Street: Banks are reportedly weighing cutting analyst hiring by two-thirds (paywalled for me on desktop but it's loading fine on mobile):
I don't know how to evaluate the claims in the article because I have little understanding of what a banking analyst actually does on a day to day basis. How much of it requires "thought" (not thought of incredible complexity and originality, but thought nonetheless) and how much of it is just plugging numbers into Excel in a relatively formulaic fashion?
In general I lean towards being skeptical of these claims, especially in domains where I have little expertise, because the dominant pattern of the last 2 years is that people who don't know much about X tend to overestimate how good AI is at X.
If I compare this to a domain where I do have some knowledge (computer programming), most of the tests that people use to demonstrate LLMs' coding ability aren't particularly representative of what programmers do on a daily basis. Sitting down and opening a new blank file and "writing code to do X" is certainly part of the job, and it can be a bigger or smaller part of the job depending on what type of organization you're at and what type of project you're working on etc, but it's not the whole job (for some programmers, it's a very small part of it!)
So I'd like people with more domain knowledge to weigh in on what aspects of these financial jobs are liable to be automated today and what the forecast for the field is like.
I support an Investment bank department. To my understand analyst is more rank than role and can do a wide variety of things depending on the department. The group of analysts I work most closely with are looking at the developers that have successfully won bids to build low income housing for Low income housing tax credits. LIHTC pay out over like 10 years and developers don't want to be in the business of keeping assets on their books, they want to build and move on.
So the analysts I'm working with are trying to determine what a good deal with one of these developers would look like, Most basically we supply the capital and our org gets to put our name in the proper place that lets us get the tax credits but there are many different ways to go about it, and then bidding on those deals. In practice you have pricing analysts that try and find the best deal, usually with an eye for price per tax credit. There are underwriting analysts doing something close to building up pitch books for the deal, turning the data we get from the developer in a comprehensive document and looking into things that might impact occupancy like nearby crime rate and the kind of special needs populations that might be serviced in the area as well as the various guarantees and business stuff. There are risk analysts that I know less about and I believe to be looking at the whole portfolio to make sure we're looking good from a risk perspective.
AI isn't really threatening our department any more than us tech guys already are by building out tools to make the process more efficient. In the end of the day these deals have big dollar amounts of them and making labor more efficient probably wouldn't have us cut head count as much as make us willing to go after smaller deals that we currently don't think are worth the time it takes to underwrite them.
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