Digitalization vs employment: banking sector experience

The paper shows that economy digitalization is inevitable, but is still an insufficiently studied consequence of ICT development. Among the main economic challenges of digitalization is the transformation of the traditional labor market. According to experts, the Russian economy can use the "transition to all things digital" as one of the key factors for GDP growth. At the same time, the degree of readiness of individual industries to accept digital technologies varies significantly. The financial sector is in the lead, which is why bank employees were the first to face the negative consequences of large-scale IT projects of their employers. This paper provides an assessment of the dependence of the need for bank employees on the most likely threats of credit institutions, including economic recession, revocation of banks licenses and investments in ICT technology. The obtained results confirm those of a number of international studies of different years on the absence of a significant relation between vacancies and the digitalization expenses of credit institutions. The analysis of digitalization influence on the need for bank employees is accompanied by indirect assessment of this influence - through evaluating the dependence of banking divisions number on investments in digital technologies. PAO Sberbank, the main market player and leader in the implementation of IT projects, was chosen as the object of research. The built regression model made it possible to identify a significant dependence of indicators and predict changes in the number of Sberbank divisions with a high level of reliability.