The Finance Sector Is Feeling the Robot Burn
As U.K. banks digitize the processing of checks, fewer human hands are needed.
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At about 10:30 p.m., trucks roll up to a facility in a quiet business park on the edge of Northampton, a town in central England best-known for shoemaking. They carry bank checks. About 1 million of them must be processed before dawn.
The men and women who staff the graveyard shift at Intelligent Processing Solutions (IPSL) know the days of shipping pieces of paper by trucks and planes are ending. Today, U.K. banks physically receive each check in a mammoth paper-shuffling exercise, but they’ll start accepting digital images next year. That will likely eliminate the need for as many as two-thirds of the jobs processing them, according to several people familiar with the situation.