AI discovers which bankers have the greatest propensity to smile

Artificial intelligence can be used for a lot of things. Curing cancer, developing iterative trading strategies, predicting sepsis in intensive care. It can also be used to analyze people's mugshots. Snappr, a photo analysis company which uses AI to scan photos and ascertain their quality, has applied its technical expertise to bankers' LinkedIn photos.

Snappr evaluated bankers' photos on LinkedIn on the basis of their expression ('smile and jawline'), their composition ('zoom and background') and their photo quality ('saturation and sharpness'). It combined these to create a single measure of quality. It also looked specifically at whether bankers were smiling. The results are shown in the tables below.

So, HSBC, Citi and BNP Paribas employees are the world's smiliest. Naturally these numbers may be skewed by the addition of large numbers of cheerful retail banking employees. HSBC's employees are nearly 40% more smiley than BNP Paribas' (despite the arrival of a new investment banking taskmaster, although maybe the photos were taken before he arrived).

Across banking, financial services and capital markets, Snappr found that the smiliest photos belonged to bank employees in the U.S., Australia and England. U.S. bankers were around 38% more smiley than those in England. Wall Street bankers are therefore advised not to display their white teeth too liberally in the City.

Overall, the highest quality photos belonged to bankers at Citi and to bankers in Australia.

Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com