[akiselev]

> But somehow today more people work at banks than in the past, even accounting for population growth. Why would CRUD apps that make some stuff more efficient change this?

Population growth doesn't account for regulatory changes and it takes a while to automate anything that interfaces with the law because of the inherent risk in getting it wrong. Banks are acutely exposed to this because they're often the ones who are ultimately responsible - they're the default insurance policy against counterparty risk.

[bko]

Sure, that makes sense when talking about employee count in aggregate. But specifically the number of bank tellers has doubled. Surely bank tellers should have more tools at their disposal to be more efficient, and surely fewer people would use bank tellers with things like ATMs and online banking. But somehow we have more bank tellers.

[akiselev]

Tellers could have gotten twice as efficient and still double in size if the number of transactions requiring human intervention increased four-fold, especially if the move to online banking has driven an increase in fraud and user error. It's a number that scales with regulatory demands, transaction count, total volume, and so on - not number of active users.

Edit: Tellers also tend to be general purpose account managers at smaller banks, so if you called up the bank you'd eventually get forwarded to someone on the floor at your local branch instead of a call center.

[pcthrowaway]

Maybe the percentage of people who are unbanked has decreased significantly since ATMs were introduced.

Additionally, people are much more reliant on financial services and payment rails. Credit cards weren't as common (and required for almost everything) 20 years ago. People used cash for probably 10X as many transactions as they do now, so you probably had more 'cash economies'