Banks shed 60,000 jobs in one of worst years for cuts since financial crisis

financialpost.com:

Global banks eliminated more than 60,000 jobs in 2023, marking one of the heaviest years for cuts since the financial crisis and reversing much of their hiring as they emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Investment banks suffered a second consecutive year of plummeting fees as deal making and public listings dried up, leaving Wall Street trying to protect profit margins by reducing head count.

Elsewhere, the takeover of Credit Suisse Group AG by UBS AG has already resulted in at least 13,000 fewer roles at the combined bank, with further big redundancy rounds expected in the year ahead.

“There is no stability, no investment, no growth in most banks — and there are likely to be more job cuts,” said Lee Thacker, owner of financial services headhunting firm Silvermine Partners, adding: “There are some very nice gifts being sent to bosses at the moment.”

Twenty of the world’s biggest banks cut at least 61,905 jobs in 2023, according to Financial Times calculations. That compares with more than 140,000 jobs slashed by the same lenders during the global financial crisis of 2007-08.

The FT used company disclosures and its own reporting to compile the data and did not include smaller banks or minor staff cuts so the overall total of job losses in the sector will be higher.

Previous years of extensive job losses by banks, such as 2015 and 2019, were affected by large-scale cuts at European lenders struggling to cope with historic low interest rates. But at least half of 2023’s reductions came from Wall Street lenders, whose investment banking businesses have struggled to cope with the speed of interest rate rises in the United States and Europe.

In many of those instances, the lenders are rowing back on hires they made coming out