Financial activities shed 14,000 jobs in July, while commercial banks sharply increased their demand for workers with AI skills.
The U.S. unexpectedly lost 23,000 jobs in July, marking the first monthly payroll decline in five months. One of the clearest weak spots was the financial sector, where employment fell to its lowest level in four years even as banks ramped up demand for workers with AI skills.
Financial activities shed 14,000 jobs last month, bringing total employment in the sector to 9.09 million. The Bureau of Labor Statistics told Inc. that the industry last employed fewer people in July 2022. Since its peak in May 2025, the sector has lost 121,000 jobs.
The shift is already playing out at individual companies. Last week, Chime co-founder and CEO Chris Britt told employees that the fintech would cut nearly 150 jobs, or about 10 percent of its workforce, as it reorganized around AI.
“AI is changing what’s possible but requires new skills,” Britt wrote. “Smaller teams with fewer layers are moving faster than ever and getting more done.”
Chime is cutting jobs while continuing to grow. The company reported $670 million in second-quarter revenue this week, up 27 percent from a year earlier, and raised its 2026 revenue-growth forecast to between 25 percent and 26 percent.
Finance was already considered particularly exposed to technological disruption. A 2024 Citi analysis estimated that 54 percent of jobs in the financial sector had a high potential for automation.
Within finance, July’s losses were concentrated in lending and insurance. Credit intermediation shed 8,800 jobs, including 2,500 in commercial banking, while insurance employment fell by 6,700. Employment in securities and investment-related activities increased by 1,000.
Banks Are Looking for a Different Kind of Worker
The decline in finance employment cannot be attributed entirely to AI.
“The decline in banking employment started well before the usage of AI and correlates strongly with the original interest rate hikes,” Ron Hetrick, principal economist at labor-market analytics firm Lightcast, told Inc.
BLS data support that timeline. Credit-intermediation employment ended 2022 about 31,000 jobs below its April 2021 peak, following the Federal Reserve’s seven interest-rate increases that year.
What has changed more dramatically is the type of worker banks are seeking.
Commercial banks posted 48,859 jobs requiring AI skills over the past year, a 51 percent increase from the previous year, according to Lightcast data analyzed by the Bipartisan Policy Center. Demand for large language model skills rose 68 percent, while demand for generative AI skills increased 67 percent.
“Despite the downward trend in hiring, there has been an explosion of postings in credit intermediation for jobs with AI skills,” Hetrick said. “The fact that overall employment is down, while there is a surge in AI-related postings, does suggest that priorities are likely shifting.”
ZipRecruiter is seeing a similar pattern. Finance job postings on its platform are up 10.8 percent from a year ago, although that growth is slowing. About 6.9 percent of finance postings now explicitly mention AI skills, compared with 5.3 percent of postings across all industries.
“What we’re seeing looks more like skill turnover than headcount turnover,” Nicole Bachaud, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter, told Inc.
In a recent ZipRecruiter survey of employers, 62 percent of finance companies said AI had increased productivity expectations somewhat or significantly. Eight percent said they were expanding finance roles, compared with 3.2 percent that said they were reducing them.
“This reads less like ‘AI is deleting finance jobs’ and more like ‘AI is rewriting what the job requires,’” Bachaud said.
She attributed more of the sector’s current weakness to the broader economy, while noting that overseas outsourcing may also be contributing.
AI Is Becoming Part of the Layoff Story
AI-related cuts are nevertheless beginning to spread through financial services. Earlier this year, Block cut more than 4,000 employees as co-founder Jack Dorsey reorganized the fintech around smaller teams and AI.
“Financial services is one of these industries that is announcing layoff plans related to or in conjunction with an investment in AI,” Andy Challenger, senior vice president at outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, told Inc.
Challenger cautioned that some companies may invoke AI partly “to attract or energize investors.” But, he added, “we also know AI is replacing some tasks to the point that roles are being eliminated.”
Finance has experienced far more severe contractions in the past. During the downturn surrounding the financial crisis, employment in financial activities fell by 718,000 jobs between its December 2006 peak and February 2011 trough. The sector’s current decline is nowhere near that scale.
What makes the current period notable is that financial firms are cutting jobs without a comparable banking collapse while simultaneously investing in technology designed to increase output per worker.
For employees, the immediate risk may be less about AI eliminating entire professions and more about employers changing what workers need to know—and how much they are expected to produce.
“It appears many organizations, particularly large ones, are cutting first and doing this planning second,” Challenger said.