The Future of Banking: AI Side Hustles for Junior Bankers
It’s not so long ago that Anthropic was reportedly hiring junior bankers and paying them $150 an hour to write prompts. Seven months later, Anthropic has launched an array of agents for financial services. The agents can build pitch decks and models, review earnings, and conduct market research. Now Jamie Dimon is suggesting he might need fewer bankers in the future.
A New Opportunity for Junior Bankers
Sitting in a junior banking job in the circumstances might feel like being a frog in hot water. If you are experiencing the angst, a former Deutsche Bank associate has a proposal that might allay your anxiety.
Tarun Arshakian spent nearly three years at Deutsche Bank in New York. He worked in the German bank’s investment banking coverage team “at the intersection between capital markets and M&A.” Then he left. Arshakian’s FINRA registration shows him quitting in April 2026. “The work never ends, you cannot just relax,” he says of his time in banking. “I felt like I didn’t want to do that anymore.”
Introducing Proxion AI
Arshakian is already doing something different. In February, he founded Proxion AI. Among the things Proxion offers are AI side hustles to people still working in banking.
“I work with AI labs to refine their models,” says Arshakian. “Something like Claude can build you the full model from beginning to end. That’s good enough if you’re a senior in a university, but for models to be used in a professional context they still need refining with human judgment.”
Arkashian sells AI labs this human judgment. One month after leaving Deutsche Bank, he says he’s signed up 200+ junior bankers to each work for around 15 hours a week refining AI models. They do this alongside their banking jobs and they earn $75-$300 an hour.
The Future of AI in Banking
Given that AI companies will pay thousands for the right people to train their models, Arshakian seems to be onto something. But he has bigger aspirations than acting as an employment agency arranging hustles for former colleagues. His intention is to develop a set of AI benchmarks that will set standards for whether models are any good.
“You can have models for everything from M&A transactions to credit underwriting, IPOs, debt issuance, and equity issuance and they will all need benchmarks,” he says. “In the future, the benchmarks will be like the ratings agencies.”
Arshakian has built four benchmarks already. He has no regrets about leaving Deutsche Bank. “It’s difficult to leave. You think you have a secure full-time job, but that’s in your imagination – they could fire you next month.”
He points out that he’s not asking people to leave banking anyway. “I’m saying, ‘Keep your job and take a part-time job with me.’ It will be good for your resume,” he adds. “You will know how AI works and how teaching the models works. That will make you more employable.”
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