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ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

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Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#101

Post by havaloc »

danielbln wrote: post #55
dehrmann wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is true, but for serious tasks, I need the screen real estate. I'm amazed at what some people can do from a phone, but also wonder if they're missing things, of if it's actually inefficient.

I'm going to bet that you are a millennial or older? We need our big screens for $IMPORTANT work (buying big things, money stuff, etc.). GenZ tends to be less bothered by it and just does it all on the tiny screen in their pocket. It's time to schedule a colonoscopy.

My boomer dad does more things on his phone than I do and I'm Gen X. It's actually astonishing how much he does on his iPhone. I'm dragging out the laptop and he's on his iPhone happy as a clam.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#103

Post by cjbgkagh »

alex_sf wrote: post #98
cjbgkagh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think it's likely that this is the first major productivity boom that won't be followed with a consumption boom, quite the opposite. It'll result in a far greater income inequality. Things will be cheaper but the poor will have fewer ways to make money to afford even the cheaper goods.

If goods aren't being sold, then the price will drop.

It's not that simple. If a poor person makes zero dollars how much of the reduced cost item could they now afford?

We have a massively distorted economy driven by debt financialization and legalised banking cartels. It leads to weird inversions. For example as long as housing gets increasingly expensive at a predictable rate the housing becomes more affordable instead of less as banks are more able to lend money. The inverse is also true, if housing were to drop at a predictable rate fewer people would be able to get a mortgage on the house so fewer people could afford to buy one. Housing won't drop below cost of materials and labor (ignoring people dumping housing to get rid of tax debts as I would include such obligations in the cost of acquisition). Long term it's not sustainable but long term is multi-generational.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#104

Post by bpfrh »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #6
bdcravens wrote: post #2

That paired with an increasingly cashless society. (Which is also in large part to smart phones) Otherwise you'd still need more tellers to conduct transactions that exceed ATM limits.

As far as I can tell, it's entirely that. The things the author cites as how mobile banking supplanted going to the bank (paying for things with debit cards, getting your paycheck direct deposited, etc) have nothing to do with mobile banking. They are all just as you said: we live in an increasingly cashless society, the only reason to go to the branch is to deposit or withdraw money, so the need for tellers has gone…

Something that only came with the banking apps was opening of accounts via camera based identification and other security critical stuff, like 2fa for transfers, resetting card pins and setting other security features.

It's also easier to scan payments via app than go to the bank, something that is only possible via native like apps

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#106

Post by GuB-42 »

I didn't notice any link with the iPhone, except maybe a vague coincidence in timing. Online banking existed before the iPhone, it worked using websites, on personal computers. And it took some time before smartphones were taken seriously by banks.

What I noticed however is a noticeable decrease in service quality in bank branches while online (desktop browser) options became better. Banks pushed customers out of their branches progressively. In the early 2010s tellers couldn't do anything you couldn't do online by yourself. For services like dealing with large quantities of cash, or coins, they made it so that you couldn't do more than what the ATMs allowed you to do, limiting the amount of cash the branch had access to and increasing how much you could withdrew from ATMs.

They didn't get the idea to fire all their tellers when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. It was a decision at least a decade in the making. It is just that people tend to resist change so it happens slowly, especially for big, serious business like banking. And I don't think it is a bad thing.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#107

Post by _DeadFred_ »

alex_sf wrote: post #98
cjbgkagh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think it's likely that this is the first major productivity boom that won't be followed with a consumption boom, quite the opposite. It'll result in a far greater income inequality. Things will be cheaper but the poor will have fewer ways to make money to afford even the cheaper goods.

If goods aren't being sold, then the price will drop.

Cool concept, but this isn't 1980. We've been sold these sorts of concepts for 40+ years now and things have only gotten worse.

We have a K shaped economy. Top earners take the majority. The top 20% make up 63% of all spending, and the top 10% accounted for more than 49%. The highest on record. Businesses adapt to reality and target the best market, in this case the top 10 to 20%, and the rest just get ignored, like in many countries around the world.

All that unlocked money? In a K shaped economy it mostly goes to those at the top, who look to new places to park/invest it, raising housing prices, moving the squeeze of excess capital looking for gains to places like nursing homes and veterinary offices. That doesn't result in prices going down, but in them going up.

The benefit to the average American will be more capital in the top earners' hands looking for more ways to do VC style squeezes in markets previously not as ruthless but worth moving to now as there are less and less 'untapped' areas to squeeze (because the top 10-20% need more places to park more capital). The US now has more VC funds than McDonalds.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#108

Post by mrweasel »

ahartmetz wrote: post #7

I do not get what's special about banking apps as opposed to online banking. I've been doing online banking in the browser on a PC since before apps and I'm still doing it because dealing with data on a phone is painful compared to a PC. Is an app really that much easier to use?

My bank decided that the online banking website needed to be more like the app, so now they are both terrible. Basically the entire site is white space on the computer, because everything is centred and dumb down. Input fields for numbers are invisible, they are just a label saying "Kr" and you're suppose to click it and the numerical keyboard on the phone pops up, except it obviously doesn't on the computer.

Paying billed is easier on the phone in the sense that bills in Denmark have a three part number, e.g. +71 1234567890 1234678 where the first is a type number, second is the receiver and the last is a customer number with the receiver. The phone allows to just use the camera to scan the number.

Transferring money is terrible on both platforms, because it's designed to be doable on the phone, meaning having three or four screen, but it gives you no overview. There's plenty of space on a computer for a proper overview giving you the feeling of safety, but it's not used. Same for account overview. Designed to the phone, but doesn't adapt to the bigger screen and provide you with more details, so you need to click every single expense to see what is is exactly.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#109

Post by bobthepanda »

paxys wrote: post #35

One key line about ATMs is buried deep in the article: > the number of tellers per branch fell by more than a third between 1988 and 2004, but the number of urban bank branches (also encouraged by a wave of bank deregulation allowing more branches) rose by more than 40 percent So, ATMs did impact bank teller jobs by a significant amount. A third of them were made redundant. It's just that the decrease at individual b…

IIRC, the way this worked was that by decreasing tellers required per branch, it made a lot more marginal locations pencil out for branches, at a time when the banking industry was expansionary.

This is not so helpful if AI is boosting productivity while a sector is slowing down, because companies will cut in an overabundant market where deflationary pressure exists.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#110

Post by RHSeeger »

haliskerbas wrote: post #73
aurareturn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're already seeing large software companies figure out that they don't need 5,000 developers. They probably only need 1,000 or maybe even fewer. However, the number of software companies being started is booming which should result in net neutral or net positive in software developer employment. Today: 100 software companies employ 1,000 developers each[0] Tomorrow: 10,000 software companies employ 10 developers ea…

Do the booming companies pay the same as the ones who did layoffs? If you're laid off from Meta or other top tier paying company (the behemoths doing layoffs) you might have a tough time matching your compensation.

But do they need to? If a job at a top tier company making $600k is eliminated and two jobs at a "more average" company making $300k replace it; is that really a bad thing? Clearly, there's some details being glossed over, but "one job paying more than a person really needs" being replaced by "two jobs, each paying more than a person really needs" might just be good for society as a whole.
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