From Junior Banker to AI Prompt Writer: The Changing Landscape of Finance
If you left your job as a junior banker, it used to be that there were a few paths: private equity, corporate development, maybe even a hedge fund. Now, though, you can chuck it all in and earn $150 an hour writing AI prompts instead.
Bloomberg says this is what disaffected young bankers from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley have been doing. 100 of them have been recruited by Open AI to ‘write prompts and build financial models for a range of transaction types, including restructurings and initial public offerings’ as part of something called Project Mercury.
The ex-junior bankers are not proper employees at OpenAI. They are not earning the $1m+ pay packages that engineers at OpenAI get; they’re not getting valuable stock. They’re not even getting a salary. They’ve given up their $100k+ junior banker salaries and their circa $100k bonuses, and they’re on an hourly rate instead. Given that the average hourly pay for bankers at all levels was $112 according to our most recent pay survey, $150 an hour isn’t bad. But nor is it good, when you consider that it’s just a short-term gig.
The Future of Junior Banking Jobs
There’s no going back. Once the 100 bankers have taught Open AI’s LLM how to build financial models, banks won’t need them again. Nor will banks have as much need for similar juniors in the future. JPMorgan was already raring to cut junior jobs by two-thirds and to shift jobs to India.
In the meantime, the Project Mercury jobs don’t sound hard to come by but do involve an interview process. There’s a 20-minute interview with an AI chatbot, a test of your knowledge of financial statements, and then a modeling test. If you succeed, you can work flexibly (maybe even remotely) and will be expected to submit one model a week, which will be reviewed by a ‘reviewer.’
If it all sounds very impersonal, it is. If it all sounds like the death of junior banking jobs, maybe it’s that too. In the meantime, ex-junior bankers are dismantling their former profession for a short-term hourly wage, while AI’s top technologists collect the upside. Welcome to the new world.
Recent Developments in the Banking Industry
Business Insider has been combing through the court case involving boutique firm Centerview and a junior banker who says she needed eight hours of sleep and that the bank didn’t make it clear that this wouldn’t always be a possibility.
In the case, the junior banker, Kathryn Shiber, was staffed on an active deal called “Project Dragon.” Shiber worked until 2 am for a few days until a fateful Friday when she worked until 1 am and then logged off without telling anyone. Survival in banking means asking for permission to sign off, even at 1 am. It’s easy to see why banks want AI to do the work instead.
