COOKED
Brokerage clerks reconcile trade confirmations, verify transfer paperwork, compute dividends and interest, correct posting errors, and answer routine account questions — all structured data work on screens that straight-through processing and now LLM-assisted exception handling absorb directly. FINRA operations-professional registration (Series 99) gives a thin regulatory foothold, but it licenses a function, not a signature that carries personal liability. The surviving sliver is complex exception research: failed settlements, corporate-action edge cases, and cost-basis disputes where someone must trace a break across systems and own the fix.
Part 2020 shock, part continued decline in the years since.
Median pay $52,750 → $65,750 -0.3% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
-9.5% 40,800 → 36,900 on the projections basis
Exposed, and shrinking
Both signals point the same way: the tasks are largely automatable and the BLS projects -9.5% by 2034. This is the case where the score and the forecast agree, and it is the one worth taking seriously.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~4,100 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
Stock ClerkCoupon ClerkMargin ClerkSales TraderDividend ClerkSupport BrokerTransfer AgentTransfer ClerkBrokerage AgentBrokerage ClerkBusiness BrokerQuotation ClerkSales AssistantSupport AnalystBroker AssistantBroker AssociateClient AssociateOperations ClerkSecurities ClerkBrokerage AnalystCommodities ClerkQuotation CheckerService AssociateTrading Assistant
Holding it up: task resistance . Weakest point: embodiment .
Core tasks are already automatable Trade-break reconciliation, DTC transfer verification, dividend and accrued-interest computation, and account statement posting are all deterministic matching against feeds that DTCC's straight-through settlement and T+1 automation already run unattended — the 4 rather than 10 reflects that even the exception queue is now largely rules-driven triage, with only multi-system corporate-action breaks needing a human to chase.
Fully desk- and screen-based The work is a terminal, a phone, and a printer for occasional physical certificate or Medallion-stamped transfer paperwork; the 1 is for that residual paper handling, not for anything that requires being in a particular room.
No licence, no signature requirement Series 99 (or Series 7 in lieu) registers you as an Operations Professional so FINRA can sanction the firm's supervisory chain — the customer-facing rep and the designated principal sign and carry the personal exposure, so a clerk's registration functions as a training requirement rather than a barrier to replacing the function.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs Deciding whether a cost-basis discrepancy is a wash-sale adjustment or a bad tax lot import is real analysis, but it resolves against IRS rules, the prospectus, and the firm's ops manual with a supervisor signing the correcting journal entry — discretion inside a written procedure, not ownership of an ambiguous call.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (4/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (4/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (3/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (4/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 11 of this occupation's 16 points (69%).
Embodiment (1/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
Loan Officers EXPOSED
Accountants and Auditors EXPOSED
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 27/100, still COOKED.
Task-mix shift is genuine here: the occupation has a routine tier (confirm matching, dividend computation, standing-instruction transfers) and a judgment tier (failed settlements, corporate-action elections on unusual terms, cost-basis and wash-sale disputes, DTC/ACATS breaks traced across custodian, clearing firm and transfer agent). If the routine tier is fully absorbed, the residual role is exception research where no single system holds the truth and reconciliation requires phoning counterparties. T+1 settlement (SEC rule effective May 2024) and the proposed move toward T+0 compress the window for resolving a break to hours, which raises the value of a human who can chase it out of band.
FINRA currently registers the operations professional (Series 99) as a function, not a signature. A rule change requiring a named registered principal to attest to specific operational outputs — e.g. an amendment to FINRA Rule 3110 supervisory-control or Rule 4370 requiring individual sign-off on machine-generated corporate-action elections, cost-basis reporting to IRS under 1099-B, or ACATS transfer approvals — would convert this into a personal-liability foothold. Watch also SEC Rule 15c3-3 possession-and-control reconciliations, where an attested human reviewer of automated segregation calculations is a live supervisory-technology question in FINRA's annual Regulatory Oversight Report.
If firms formalise the exception desk as the owner of break resolution decisions — buy-in/close-out calls under Reg SHO Rule 204, choosing between fail-to-deliver remedies, deciding whether a cost-basis correction triggers a customer-reimbursable error — rather than routing those to a manager, the surviving clerk role owns consequential calls under ambiguity. This is an internal org-design change, not a legal one, and is visible in how firms staff post-T+1 exception teams.
The limit. Trust premium has no realistic route: the buyer is an institution, the work is invisible to the end customer, and no retail or institutional client will ever pay extra to have a human reconcile their trade confirmation. Embodiment is fixed at floor. Even with the liability and judgment levers fully realised, the surviving population is a fraction of 35,940 — these levers protect the exception-research tier, not the headcount.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 7,100 | $78,930 +20% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 2,000 | $61,010 -7% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 1,790 | $63,390 -4% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 1,730 | $77,710 +18% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 1,360 | $89,370 +36% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI | 930 | $62,110 -6% |
| Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ | 840 | $61,990 -6% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 760 | $64,000 -3% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 320 | $90,220 +37% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 1,360 | $89,370 +36% |
| Akron, OH | 110 | $81,230 +24% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 16. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.