The comments come at a time when banks are increasingly looking ways in which they can use technology to trim costs and streamline processes.

UBS' chief executive has said his firm could have 30 per cent fewer staff in ten years' time as technology disrupts banking, just weeks after a rival bank's head claimed a “big number” of staff will lose jobs to robots. 

“We see a lot of contraction in the number of people in our industry,” Sergio Ermotti, CEO of the world's largest wealth manager, said in an interview with Bloomberg Markets. “But the jobs are going to be much more interesting jobs, where the human content is crucial to the delivery of the service.”

His comments chime with those made last month by John Cryan, CEO of Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest lender, who said that accountants could be replaced with automated machines as banks look to trim costs and make internal processes more efficient. 

“In our bank, we have people doing work like robots,” he said. “Tomorrow, we will have robots behaving like people. It doesn't matter if we as a bank will participate in these changes or not – it is going to happen.”

He suggested, however, that by automating accounting processes, this would enable staff currently holding these roles to thoroughly analyse numbers and statistics produced by robots, rather than spend “three to four weeks” producing accounts themselves.

“If you take an accountant at the bank, a large part of their job is to produce numbers,” Cryan said. “Wouldn’t it be great, if machines could produce those numbers in just a few hours? Then accountants could analyse the numbers, form valid opinions what those numbers mean and not just produce them.”