Indeed, many jobs will be taken over by AI and automation, and the majority of these jobs will be in ops.

As for the front office, the situation is more nuanced. Most banks have 2 main parts: Retail and corporate. Retail refers to individuals, people like you and me, while corporate refers to companies. The front offices of both retail and corporate banking will not be equally affected by technology, because the financial needs of both groups of customers are different and correspondingly, the banking solutions to meet them. Retail will be more badly affected because the financial needs of individuals (and thus the work required to meet these needs) tends to be less complex than that of corporations. This makes it easier to automate the work away, because its easier to express the solutions to meet these needs as a set of rules in the form of programming language. Also, people are increasingly empowered to take charge of their own finances today; mobile banking apps, investment blogs and robo-advisors abound today where none existed before the advent of the Internet. Why do you need a financial advisor/RM when you can just DIY? Moreover, it's cheaper as these people charge commission. Over the shorter term, covid has affected retail RMs more than corporate RMs already, as only the former earns commission. Without being able to meet clients due to safe distancing measures, I expect that their salaries will drop by at least half (yes their commission is much greater than their basic).

My advice to people looking to join the back office of a local bank is to only consider doing so if you have less than 10 years in your career left ahead of you. If you're a fresh grad, avoid the back office, even if it's the tech side. All 3 local banks face great difficulty in attracting local tech talent and have resorted to hiring vast numbers of foreigners (mostly from India) to plug the gap. There are 3 main reasons for this. Firstly, banks are hamstrung by tight banking laws and MAS guidelines that seek to preserve banking secrecy and prevent the financing of terrorism & money-laundering activities. This means that these companies will be among the last to adopt new technologies and solutions, as they will need to test and re-test and re-re-test to ensure these new systems and tools are safe to use. By then, the wider tech industry would have largely forgotten about them. Secondly, many platforms in current use are legacy systems which are very difficult to phase out and have very limited scope for improvement. The value of proficiency in such systems and market demand for such skills are correspondingly low. Thirdly, most banks (yes even international banks) do not develop their own systems; instead they outsource such work to third-party vendors. You will be spending more time doing vendor management work (read chasing and threatening) than actual development work. Most of the fresh grads who join tech in a local bank have no computing background whatsoever, they simply hear the words "bank" and "tech" and come to the conclusion that it will be a sexy job. They are sorely mistaken. The banks' inability to attract com sci grads is the surest indicator of the unattractiveness of their tech jobs, and no wonder when even NUS computing profs caution their own from taking them up: s://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2734212006649243&id=695707917 166339