Robots are coming for City jobs first

City jobs will be lost to automation earlier than those in the wider job market, new research reveals. The first wave of automation arriving in the next two to three years will hit financial and professional services hardest compared to other industries, according to the analysis of more than 200,000 jobs across 26 counties by PwC. As many as 30 per cent of jobs across the economy could be lost to automation by 2030, and between two and three per cent lost during an initial wave beginning in the early 2020s. But for financial services jobs, that's predicted to stand at between six and eight per cent because they are easy to automate with simple algorithms. "When you look at financial services, a lot of jobs are relatively routine jobs such as data analysis. Particularly clerical, which makes up a quarter [of financial jobs], are vulnerable to automation," said PwC chief economist John Hawksworth.