From Clerks to Agentic-AI: How will Technology Change Labor Market in Finance?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yu, Lu, Li, Xiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Yu, Lu
Li, Xiang
author_facet Yu, Lu
Li, Xiang
contents Financial firms have gone through three major technological waves: computerization in the 1980s and 1990s, the rise of indexing and passive investing in the 2000s and 2010s, and the AI and automation wave from roughly 2015 to the present. This project studies how much labor is required to manage capital across those waves by tracking a simple productivity measure: assets under management per employee. Using a small panel of representative firms, we compare changes in AUM per employee, revenue per employee, and operating expense intensity over time. The goal is not to identify causal effects, but to document stylized facts about how technology changes the scale of asset management work.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_19833
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Clerks to Agentic-AI: How will Technology Change Labor Market in Finance?
Yu, Lu
Li, Xiang
Econometrics
Computers and Society
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
Financial firms have gone through three major technological waves: computerization in the 1980s and 1990s, the rise of indexing and passive investing in the 2000s and 2010s, and the AI and automation wave from roughly 2015 to the present. This project studies how much labor is required to manage capital across those waves by tracking a simple productivity measure: assets under management per employee. Using a small panel of representative firms, we compare changes in AUM per employee, revenue per employee, and operating expense intensity over time. The goal is not to identify causal effects, but to document stylized facts about how technology changes the scale of asset management work.
title From Clerks to Agentic-AI: How will Technology Change Labor Market in Finance?
topic Econometrics
Computers and Society
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19833