Global banking giant HSBC has revealed plans to cut 25,000 jobs in the next two years. These cuts will be in addition to the 5,000 roles axed this year.
As it announced quarterly profits of £7 billion, the bank said it hopes the job cuts will help to reduce operating costs by £2.1 billion.
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Chief executive Stuart Gulliver said the cuts will not have as much impact on the UK as on other global markets. The bank plans to withdraw from 20 geographies in the next two years, and close many of its US retail branches.
When HSBC announced last month that 5,000 jobs will go this year, trade union Unite reported that 67 UK-based software development roles were included in that total. "The rationale for the losses is reduced global demand, a shift from developing software to ‘deploying’ it and HSBC’s global impetus to cut £1bn in costs," it wrote at the time.
In a statement accompanying today’s results, HSBC chairman Douglas Flint remarked that the the decision whether to ‘ring-fence’ their retail operations to protect consumers from their riskier investment activities, as the government has suggested, should rest in part on whether "the benefit of this incremental restructuring… outweighs the considerable cost and time commitment".
At Information Age‘s most recent roundtable debate, delegated questioned how prepared the IT departments of banks would be to support this ‘ring-fencing’. “Ring-fencing means separating the bank into different legal entities, and some organisations just aren’t set up to do that right now,” said an enterprise architect from a major European bank.
