N.Y. hiring bonanza may be a bane.

The very forces that make it a good time to be a bank customer in Manhattan right now may be making it a bad time to be a banker.

The unstoppable roll of new branch openings in New York County--more than half of them in Manhattan--necessitates bankers to staff those banks. But the boon

"There are more jobs, but they're lower paid," said one manager. "With so many branches, to be a banker is becoming more like a retail store job, whereas before, it implied expertise and pay to match," said one career banker, who preferred not to be named.

Another, at JPMorgan Chase, which has rolled out many new branches in response to newcomers flooding Manhattan, said a lot of those banks do not pay to educate their staff, as was traditional before.

NYC may be experiencing something unique, said ABA spokesman John Hall, but, he added, "front-line employees are always hard to find and have so much to know with so much compliance now required."

The latest FDIC statistics show a 35% increase in NYC bank branches between mid-2002 and mid-2006, which does not appear to be abating. Most of the 631 branches are in Manhattan, an island that's not even a two-mile by 13-mile stretch.

ABABJ recently encountered not one but two bankers who commute weekly from Canada to Manhattan to work for different banks. Both felt their situations were a bit unusual in that they are technology specialists, not branch staff. Indeed, branch employees said they would not earn enough to justify such a commute.

--Orla O'Sullivan, a freelance writer based in New York City