While I realize this article is focusing on the more traditional "bankers jobs", every time I read an article about jobs at banks, I think of things I've been told by a few close friends who worked in the industry (back when my area had a few banks who's headquarters were local).

I am good friends with a couple of folks who worked in bank IT. Both have told me similar stories despite working for different companies and not knowing each-other, so I'm reasonably convinced of their accuracy. Though it might be something limited to these local banks (who were not huge players by any stretch), I get the impression it's a common thing. Both worked in IT, one in development and one in "everything except development and mainframe[0]". The non-dev guy told me that about every 6 months, the bank would axe an entire department -- and not just some oddball, unimportant department -- in one case it was a large group of people responsible for administration around loans and mortgages. This department would cease to exist despite being once considered a necessity (and arguably still a necessity). Three months later, they'd hire in a bunch of folks and create a department that was effectively doing what the axed department was doing (sometimes under the same name and staffed with many of the same people).

Non-core departments like HR and IT would be ebb and flow in radical ways -- my developer friend was let go when they just decided they were going to pay a company in India to build all of their apps and abandoned the local Java developers who were hired on to reduce their dependency on the mainframe, which never happened.

The environment they described sounds like a caricature of "Office Space". There was one case where a guy worked a pay-period too long and discovered he was supposed to have been let go only when his direct deposit didn't appear in his bank account and one case where they had to sue a former employee because he was notified 5 years ago that his position was cut, he'd stopped coming into work, yet they continued to pay him and he continued to cash the checks.

They've both been out of "Bank IT" for a long time, now, but I'm fairly certain these issues persisted at least until 2010. I recall one of the banks, when they started offering "Online Banking", required you to use your social security number as your logon ID and limited passwords to case-insensitive, letters only, with a 10 character maximum. It just had the smell of being a clear-text password stored in a varchar(10) field on a database without case sensitivity turned on. And companies like American Express were (are?) doing things almost as badly.

Because of all of this, I have a feeling the article has some things wrong. My sense is that the banks these guys worked for never really had a net job loss, they just operated in a revolving-door fashion -- axing departments while increasing headcount in others, and then repeating every few months with the departments names' being pulled out of a hat. I don't doubt that large sums of money are thrown into automation, particularly around algorithmic trading, because it directly makes the bank money (but I doubt that's happening at any of the smaller banks like the ones that my friends worked for).

From what I understand, the same people that were let go from IT in the last round of layoffs are the only ones they can get to apply for the new jobs[1]. My buddy in IT -- who saw his department go from 10 employees to ... him and his boss ... ended up being re-staffed a few months later with five folks who had just been let go from a local competing bank and worked in IT for his boss at some point in the past... it was a revolving door with the same people going in and out of it.

[0] And it was quite literally everything. This was early 2000 so that included the handful of traditional racked servers, routers, and the small number of endpoint-desktops connected via 16Mb Token-ring and given mostly to executives for them to use the screen-savers, Lotus 1-2-3 and terminal program to access the mainframe. He was supposed to be responsible only for the servers/network, but often found himself stuck working on the help desk and doing end-user support due to staffing constraints.

[1] Prior to meeting these two fine gentlemen, I applied for a job that I eventually turned down because I was so disappointed with the quality of individuals that interviewed me. The woman I talked to couldn't hide her disappointment, but there was something off that I later came to believe could be summed up by the phrase "yeah, not surprised".