The automation of M&A at Goldman Sachs is scaring bankers: It’s revenge of the nerds over on Wall Street, as top firms look to automate M&A transactions to the dread of junior bankers. Programmers at Goldman Sachs have already taken over the trading floor, and the ‘strats’ — as they are affectionately known inside the investment bank — have now moved to support equity underwriting, leveraged buyouts and other financial services and real estate transactions — jobs that instinctively lend themselves less to tech than does trading. The move has gotten some bankers sweating, as advances in technology could thin the ranks of low-level staff at Goldman as much as 10% in the next few years, people familiar with the matter said. Research firm Coalition says that the top 10 Wall Street firms have cut the number of client-facing investment bankers they employ by 15 percent since 2010. While these cuts are part of a wider series of layoffs by Goldman Sachs as 4Q16 revenues fell 9% year-on-year, the proportion of hires from schools like MIT (as opposed to say MBA holders from Wharton) is on the rise, writes Olivia Oran for Reuters.

Goldman Sachs is not hiding that this is the direction in which it’s heading. At a Harvard event in January, Deputy CFO Marty Chavez — a computer scientist who’s risen up the ranks by leading teams of strats and a contender to succeed CEO Lloyd Blankfein — said some investment banking tasks were "begging to be automated," according to MIT Technology Review. Yet despite this frankness, top executives belittle the concerns and state that the goal is to free up juniors to help executives make more money. In the end, as with manufacturing, bankers may have to end up developing skills which cannot be replicated by software, something Chavez himself has been calling for.