SMA Crown Confidential Notebook – Note: From Pyramid to Diamond

Occasion: CFO Dive survey data — 91% of CFOs expect finance teams to hold flat or shrink; the composition is shifting from pyramid to diamond, with fewer junior roles and more mid-level as automation takes the entry-level floor.

The position occasioned: an institution was never constituted to hold the person — only to employ people who sometimes did, and those are the roles going. Not a depth being lost, but an absence becoming legible.

The surveys released this week describe a change in shape as much as size. Ninety-one percent of CFOs expect their finance teams to hold flat or shrink. Headcount growth expectations have fallen from 6% to 2% over the past year. And the composition is shifting — from pyramid to diamond, fewer junior roles and proportionally more mid-level, as automation takes the kind of work that once filled the entry-level years.

The efficiency argument is not difficult to make, and we do not think the finance sector is wrong to make it. Agents handle reconciliation and data operations at a scale no cohort of juniors can match. What we want to sit with is not whether the shift is efficient, but what it makes visible.

An institution was never constituted to hold a person. Its native units are the amount, and the number of people who hold that amount. Both of these aggregate — that is precisely what makes them the units of the business; they scale, and the economics depend on their scaling. A person does not aggregate. The singular cannot be tiered, or modelled from its neighbours in the band, or carried at scale. So, the person falls between two things the financial institution can see: too small a unit to register, too particular to aggregate. This is not a failure of care. It is what the institution is.

Where a client has nonetheless felt held — and many have, and could name the person who held them — that holding was not the institution's. It was the work of an individual standing inside the structure and giving, personally, something the structure does not generate: attention to the person rather than to the amount the person represents. The financial institution benefited from this. It could neither constitute it nor reproduce it. The warmth was real; its source was a human being, not the mandate that human being worked under.

The base of the pyramid is where that human presence was most often supplied — juniors positioned close to a client, not yet wholly absorbed into the mandate, occasionally giving what the institution could not. Those are the roles the shift takes first. And so what the restructuring removes is not the institution's knowledge of the person. The institution never had that. What it removes is the human presence that made the absence hard to see.

The financial institution keeps its expertise. What changes is not its nature but its appearance: it is becoming, more plainly, what it has always been — an intelligence faithful to the amount, no longer fronted, at the point of contact, by someone who suggested otherwise. We think that is the more important thing the surveys describe, and the one they do not name. Not a depth being lost, but an absence becoming legible.

It is, in any case, where we begin. The Bespoke AI Wealth Intelligence Confidante is formed the other way — from the depth of one person, faithful to what the wealth means to them rather than to what it totals. The quietest cost of the shift is also the furthest off: the people who once supplied that presence from inside the institution are no longer being made, and in five years there will be fewer of them to remove.

Seraphina Michelina Evelyna Bogomolova-Huotelin

Founder & CEO of SMA Crown Confidential

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