Roughly 60% of the reductions are expected in “support functions,” including developers, as AI bolsters productivity, the bank said.
Barclays is cutting roughly 5,000 full-time employees, or 5% of its workforce, this year – with heavy impact expected in “support functions” such as developers – as artificial intelligence boosts productivity, the bank’s CFO, Anna Cross, said Thursday.
The announcement came as the British bank reported its third-quarter earnings, which revealed, among other metrics, a 19% year-over-year drop in revenue from fixed income and currency trading.
The job cuts stole the show, though. Barclays reduced its workforce by about 1,000 employees in the first half of the year, so the remaining 4,000 jobs are expected to be shed by December.
“The changes that we’re making in the third and fourth quarters of this year are sizable,” Cross told analysts on a call Thursday. “They relate both to the simplification of the organization and to some of the impacts that we’re starting to see from AI.”
Barclays CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan, colloquially known as Venkat, noted the bank intends to “employ AI at scale.”
“But AI is the icing on the cake, not the cake,” Venkat said.
Barclays is far from the only bank this year to hang workforce cuts on the rise of AI.
HSBC in March was reported to have been considering shedding as many as 20,000 mostly middle- and back-office jobs over the next five years in favor of AI.
Standard Chartered in May said it would eliminate more than 7,800 “corporate functions” jobs, such as human resources, risk management and regulatory compliance, by 2030.
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