COOKED
This residual clerk category is built out of exactly the work software eats first: keying transactions into financial systems, reconciling account records against statements, checking documents for completeness, chasing missing paperwork, and generating routine reports. There is no licensure, no signature liability, and the modal worker executes defined procedures on defined inputs rather than making judgment calls. The small surviving slice is exception handling — the odd transaction that doesn't reconcile, the customer or vendor who needs a phone call, the audit request that requires digging through history.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
Median pay $42,420 → $53,830 +1.5% 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
+1.4% 38,900 → 39,400 on the projections basis
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +1.4% more of these jobs by 2034. Demand for the output is growing faster than the work is being automated away — the mechanism BLS gives for software developers, and the combination people most often misread as an error.
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.
~4,000 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
Vault TellerBank Vault ClerkSafe Deposit ClerkBank Vault AttendantBank Vault CustodianSafety Deposit ClerkFinancial Reserve ClerkFinancial Operations Clerk
The BLS uses Financial Clerks, All Other for work that doesn't fit any named occupation, so it covers roles that have little in common with each other. Two consequences worth knowing before you read anything below:
Holding it up: task resistance . Weakest point: liability shield .
Core tasks are already automatable Matching remittance advice to open invoices, keying batch deposits, flagging accounts that don't tie, and pulling a standing weekly report are all structured-input/structured-output tasks that ERP modules and RPA scripts already do end-to-end — the 5 rather than a 0 reflects the residual chasing of a vendor whose paperwork never arrived and the unreconciled item nobody documented.
Fully desk- and screen-based The physical component is walking to a printer, opening mail, pulling a folder from a file room, or scanning a stack for imaging — real but incidental, which is why it sits at 3 and not at 0.
No licence, no signature requirement No state licence, no bonding requirement, no CPA-style attestation: your reconciliation is reviewed and signed off by an accountant or controller, and the 1 exists only because some employers require a bond or background check for cash-handling roles.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs Discretion runs to deciding whether a $12 variance is worth escalating or whether a document is complete enough to process; the dollar thresholds, approval routes, and escalation rules come from a controller's written policy, which is why this is 4 and not the 8-plus you'd give someone setting those thresholds.
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 (5/20 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 (1/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (4/20) 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 9 of this occupation's 17 points (53%).
Embodiment (3/20) 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.
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 33/100, still COOKED.
Task-mix shift: as RPA/AI absorbs keying, matching and report generation, the residual role collapses onto exception handling — unreconciled items, vendor disputes, audit trail reconstruction, and 'the system says X but the document says Y' cases. This is a genuine two-tier job and the surviving tier is the judgment tier; the count shrinks but the remaining job scores higher.
BSA/AML sector specifically: FinCEN and FFIEC guidance already expects a human disposition decision on automated transaction-monitoring alerts, with the SAR filed under an accountable institution officer. If clerks in bank back offices are formally designated alert-dispositioning staff under the AML program, personal regulatory exposure attaches.
Sarbanes-Oxley 404 / PCAOB AS 2201 pressure on ICFR for AI-generated journal entries: if external auditors and audit committees require a named human preparer-reviewer signoff on machine-proposed entries and reconciliations (segregation-of-duties and management-review-control evidence that an AI cannot satisfy), the reconciliation clerk becomes the documented control owner. Watch PCAOB inspection findings on automated controls and SEC comment letters on AI in the close process.
Escalation authority formalized: if the residual role owns the write-off threshold, the decision to release a held payment, or whether an unmatched item is fraud versus error — with a dollar authority limit in the delegation-of-authority matrix — the role owns consequential calls rather than routing them.
Narrow route only: counterparty-facing collections and vendor dispute work where the other party is a person who will not resolve with a bot. Not a general premium — buyers do not pay extra for human data entry, and no plausible mechanism makes them.
The limit. Even with every lever, this stays a low-scoring occupation. The levers raise the score of the surviving role, not the headcount — an exception-handling tier that is 15% the size of today's clerk pool scoring 35 is still 85% displacement. There is no licensure body for financial clerks and no realistic path to creating one.
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 2,740 | $54,080 +0% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 2,710 | $62,140 +15% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 1,820 | $56,980 +6% |
| Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO | 1,340 | $61,090 +13% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 1,020 | $58,010 +8% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 920 | $60,780 +13% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 800 | $56,130 +4% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 600 | $54,680 +2% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 300 | $73,030 +36% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 330 | $71,060 +32% |
| Trenton-Princeton, NJ | 140 | $64,740 +20% |
MVB Bank announced it has selected Bretton AI to run its back-office operations as it scales its fintech business.
El Periódico reports that Spain's Ibex 35 listed banks cut 8,193 jobs and closed 1,247 branches over the past year during a period of increased AI adoption.
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Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.