It was just a few years ago that I wrote about British Petroleum inaugurating its brand new natural gas trading desk at 30, South Wacker, Chicago. Now it seems tehcnology spin is running at such a high speed that all those beehive cubicles once again become a thing of the past. And again, financial sector is at the forefront of cost reduction through IT innovation.
Recent article at MIT’s Technology Review magazine revealed that Goldman Sachs has completed its money trading desk automation. It claims to achieve significant cost reduction by replacing every 4 traders with 1 IT engineer that looks after electronic trading algorythms. Their New York heardquarters only 10 years ago were employing 600 equity traders. Now there are just two of them left.
It resembles me like some 50-70 years ago the whole world started to build first industry data centers to replace those many traditional scientist’s workplaces. USSR at that time was building their “calculation centers” as well. This time around it took just 10 years and less to apprehend the same kind of automation.
Goldman Sachs is still viewed as a white collar banking monster. But in reality this view seems to be totally wrong already. As the same article writes: “about a third of Goldman’s total staff, are computer engineers.” I wonder will take 5 years or less to see Goldman Sach or Citybank rivaling Google and Facebook in terms of their data center sizes?