A disturbing hail of sacks and downsizing trailed the global banking sector in 2023 with over 60,000 employees of banks losing their jobs among just 20 of the world’s biggest banks, a survey has revealed.
The takeover of one of the Swiss biggest banks with strong international clout, Credit Suisse, by UBS contributed mostly to this wave of personnel shedding with at least 13,000 jobs at the combined bank gone in 2023.
Financial Times (FT), the British business newspaper projected that major rounds of redundancies are expected in 2024.
According to the FT’s calculations, 20 of the world’s largest banks will have shed more than 60,000 jobs in 2023 – more than at any time since the financial crisis. The same institutions cut more than 140,000 jobs during the global financial crisis 15 years ago.
Second to UBS is the US bank Wells Fargo, which has already cut 12,000 jobs in the first nine months of the year, according to its own figures. Citigroup cut 5,000 jobs, Morgan Stanley 4,800, Bank of America 4,000 and Goldman Sachs 3,200 (ranks 3 to 6).
The Financial Times drew on information provided by the companies and its own reporting to compile the figures. At least half of the job cuts in 2023 came from Wall Street lenders, whose investment banking operations struggled with the pace of interest rate hikes in the US and Europe.
At the beginning of November, UBS had already announced in its third quarter results that around 13,000 jobs had been cut compared to the end of 2022. Calculated in full-time equivalents, the major Swiss bank had just under 116,000 jobs at the end of September.
Swissinfo, an authoritative Swiss newspaper reports that Credit Suisse, which has since been taken over, had already announced a reduction of around 9,000 jobs in October 2022, down from around 52,000 at the time. Following the takeover by UBS, the media speculated that the combined bank would cut 30,000 to 35,000 jobs out of a total of around 120,000 by the end of 2022. UBS itself has not quantified the global job cuts, but intends to reduce annual costs by more than $10 billion (CHF8.5 billion) by the end of 2026 compared to 2022.
At the end of August, UBS management announced that there would be 3,000 redundancies in Switzerland alone: 1,000 redundancies will be due to the integration of Credit Suisse’s Swiss business, with a further 2,000 redundancies in other local business areas.
