Even those at the top of the industry’s hierarchy aren’t immune. Bond trading is the single biggest source of Wall Street profit. It’s also something of a broken market. Post-crisis regulations have crimped banks’ ability to stockpile bonds, changing their traditional role in markets and creating an opening for dozens of electronic-trading startups looking to connect buyers and sellers. Fixed-income trading at the world’s biggest investment banks brought in $70 billion last year, half the 2009 level, according to data compiled by financial research firm Coalition.

When investors embrace electronic trading, margins collapse while volumes, for a few winners, surge. In equities, electronic trading has decimated the number of salespeople, traders, and floor brokers; it’s also ushered in high-speed trading firms and alternative exchanges like dark pools. These changes are well under way in government bond trading, where technology-powered firms such as Citadel Securities have made inroads, and in foreign exchange, where year-old XTX Markets now ranks as one of the world’s biggest FX firms.

In the $8.16 trillion corporate debt market—the last big refuge for people who trade over the phone—electronic trading of investment-grade bonds grew 25 percent last year, according to Greenwich Associates. MarketAxess, which is one of the biggest electronic venues in credit, clocked a 27 percent surge in trading volume in the first quarter. (Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, competes with MarketAxess in providing a venue for electronic trading of corporate debt.) Other upstarts, typically founded by Wall Street refugees, have jumped in.  As with other threats, such as e-payments and automated investing, established players aren’t sitting still. They’re opening up electronic venues so institutional clients—who use investment banks for a bundled array of services—have less reason to wander. Goldman Sachs is offering clients access to its proprietary research and analytical tools through web platforms to entice them to do more business with the firm. As banks automate fixed-income trading operations, “they will start making drastic decisions about their trading personnel,” says George Kuznetsov, Coalition’s head of research and analytics.

Even in investment banking, where the human element is central to dealmaking, technology will have an impact. Many parts of the initial public offering process are “ripe for workflow automation,” Goldman Sachs CIO Martin Chavez said in September.

What all of this means is that the number of front-office trading and dealmaking jobs has been in decline since 2007, just before the financial crisis, when it peaked at 64,521. It was 14 percent lower last year at the world’s largest investment banks, according to Coalition. Even if revenues recover because of higher interest rates, improving economies, and a rebound in debt trading, new platforms will simply scale up to the higher volumes without needing many more flesh-and-blood operators. Wall Street has reached peak human.

Saying that an industry is contracting doesn’t mean people won’t be earning a living in finance down the road. Banks will need computer engineers and data scientists—and old-fashioned voice traders to make markets in more bespoke assets such as structured credit. People will be needed to conceive of, create, and maintain new products. Matthew Dixon, an assistant professor of finance at the Illinois Institute of Technology who has studied machine learning, tells aspiring traders to learn computer programming. “The days you could just learn Excel and do some fundamental analysis are over,” Dixon says. “You’re going to be working with larger and larger amounts of data, and you’ll need to know how to use algorithms.”

Wall Street will go on -- but maybe without as many suits.

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