An ex-Morgan Stanley analyst is overseeing the junior banking AI jobs apocalypse

Banks would have it that artificial intelligence is not coming for junior banking jobs. Anthropic has other ideas. 

On Tuesday of this week, Anthropic announced the release of "ten ready-to-run agent templates" for financial services. The templates cover an array of tasks that were previously the domain of the weary junior investment banker. They include: pitchbooks, monitoring earnings reviews, building financial models and checking valuations against comparables. A little video with some charming music shows comps being run in a matter of seconds using the tools. It's a new world. Junior bankers will need to find something new to do.

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One junior banker who has already found something new to do is Nicholas Lin. In 2013, Lin graduated with a bachelors of science in finance from The Wharton School and then joined Morgan Stanley's M&A team in New York. Lin stayed two and a half years at Morgan Stanley before going to the buyside and working in tech investing with Singapore's sovereign wealth fund in San Francisco. He stayed there two years for too. Then he went to Carta, a private capital platform. Two years after that he went to Stripe, the fintech. Two years after that he went to Anthropic, where he has now been for 27 months and counting. 

Lin's life at Anthropic has been consequential for junior banking jobs. He is Anthropic's 'product lead for financial services'. Lin didn't respond to a request to comment for this article, but if junior banking jobs start disappearing as Claude's ready-to-run agent templates start running, he might be partly to blame. 

Speaking to Bloomberg this week, Lin said financial uses of AI are “just a few months behind”  coding applications, “which we’ve seen massive acceleration in.” Thousands of coding jobs have been disappearing of late. 

Speaking last November, Lin said Claude's encroachment on junior banker territory is no bad thing. "A lot of these problems we're hoping to solve are just so near and dear to my heart because I spent, you know, probably 75% of my time just doing this manual data analysis, you know, PowerPoint creation, making sure that the text boxes really match the same exact shade of blue, right?," he explained. "We want to start unloading some of that so that we can focus on what really matters, right? Building relationships, actually understanding the business model of the company without spending all day looking into these data sources that are hard to verify...." 

Tweaking an Excel model in seconds rather than hours is a noble aim, but junior bankers on the ground say their jobs aren't evolving in a good way. Instead of being out building relationships with clients, they say they're stuck at their desks building prompts. "I am no longer in the weeds, analysing company data. I am formulating prompts, formatting slides and working towards fake deadlines. It's endless churn until the early hours of every morning," one analyst told us last week.

Worse, as banks try to improve efficiencies, the junior banker said his team has stopped hiring at analyst level and that he's expected to do more than ever with managing directors expecting his productivity to be supercharged by the new AI tools. 

Tom Ragland, CEO of US recruitment firm the Harrison Rush Group confirms that first year analysts have been hit particularly hard by the AI-induced recruitment slowdown. "I have received record levels of resumes from kids who graduated from top schools and cannot get 1st year analyst or internships," Ragland says. "I try and help them and suggest reaching or to small, middle market firms or industry specific shops with less then 50 employees those smaller firms have not embraced AI as quickly." 

Junior bankers who manage to stay in the race may yet benefit over the longer term. Wall Street compensation specialist Alan Johnson tells us he expects pay to rise as junior banker numbers fall in the AI era. "There will be fewer of them and they will get more nurturing," Johnson said this week.

What of those who don't get the nurturing? They could try and become like Lin instead. There aren't many roles as head of financial services product at Anthropic, but there are side jobs in a similar zone. In February, Anthropic was said to be offering salaries of $305k-$385k for homeworking ex-bankers to design "templates" for banks to use. The fruits of these labours are now hanging low. Lin should be safe, but maybe Anthropic won't need its ex-bankers any more either.

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