National Australia Bank (NAB) to cut 2,500 roles: what it says about AI and bank jobs

No. The release lists four pressures — economic conditions, customer expectations, competition and technological change — and does not use the words artificial intelligence. The bank has not said whether any of the roles relate to AI.

That is common. Of the six bank announcements in the AI and bank jobs tracker, one names AI as the cause: DBS in Singapore, about contract roles it will not renew. The others gave reasons of their own — duplication and complexity, digital branches, a simpler operating model — or announced an AI skills program on the day cuts became public without linking the two. Where an AI link is drawn, it is usually drawn by someone other than the bank.

In general, the work of a bank's corporate centre — collecting, checking, reconciling and reporting information that already exists somewhere else in the bank — is the work automation reaches first, and the forecasts point at it: Bloomberg Intelligence's survey of 93 bank technology chiefs named the back office, the middle office and operations as the most exposed.

In the bank's own description, the cost comes out of corporate functions, layers of senior management, consultants and contractors; customer-facing banking roles are not materially affected; and the capacity freed goes to business banking first, then deposits, then home lending.

That shape — a smaller centre, protected customer-facing roles, money moved toward lending — recurs across the announcements in the tracker. When a bank restructures this way, the capacity it is protecting is the people who know a borrower's business, read the accounts and make the case, and the people who decide and sign.

The entry roles most exposed are the ones that are mostly processing: operations, reporting, the parts of a graduate rotation spent moving information from one place to another. The roles the banks are protecting face a customer and carry a decision. Aim there — What Jobs Banks Hire For lays the seats out — and prepare for the interview question this news makes certain: what in this job would you automate, and what would you keep?

A good answer names the tasks — keying the accounts into the bank's spreadsheet, the first draft of a paper's standard sections — and then names the judgment they feed, and why someone has to own it. If you want to know how you read a file before a panel finds out, The Placement reads you on 24 short files.

Work out which part of your week is moving information and which part is deciding. The first part is what restructures cut; the second is what they protect. Write the argument of a credit paper, not only its tables. Know the borrower well enough to say what the numbers leave out. Be the person who can explain, a year later, why a loan was approved or declined.

Customer-facing roles are the ones banks say they protect, so the relationship manager you deal with usually stays. What can change is behind them: who reviews a request, how quickly, and how much of the answer rests on the information you send rather than on a conversation.

Two things help in any restructure. Keep your reporting complete and on time — What to Send Your Bank Each Month sets out what a lender actually reads. And know your facility's review and expiry dates before the bank raises them: Six Months Before Your Loan Matures is the timetable.