Standard Chartered to cut 7,000+ support jobs and expand AI use by 2030

The global bank earlier said it would cut 15 per cent of corporate function roles – or more than 7,000 jobs – by 2030.

The London-headquartered lender Standard Chartered announced plans to cut more than 7,000 jobs by 2030, with CEO Bill Winters saying the bank will replace some "lower-value human capital" through automation and AI while offering retraining to affected workers. "It's not cost-cutting. It's replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we're putting in," CEO Bill Winters told reporters. "So, the people that want to reskill, that want to carry on, we're giving every opportunity to reposition," Winters said. Reuters reports: The cuts, alongside higher shareholder return targets announced in a strategy update, come as StanChart is at the tail-end of a decade-long effort to transform itself from a potential takeover target to a steadily profitable lender. Its London-listed shares, which have risen 65% in the last 12 months, fell 0.5% in early trading, as analysts said the new targets were at the conservative end of their expectations. "In a world full of uncertainty, performance may prove more challenging further out," said Ed Firth, analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, citing how the bank has benefited in recent years from high interest rates and huge wealth flows. StanChart's move to streamline operations and rein in costs comes as more global firms slash jobs by deploying AI to improve efficiency. Japanese lender Mizuho in March unveiled up to 5,000 job cuts over a decade. And banks globally are scrambling to integrate frontier AI models and fend off rising cyber threats. The most affected roles will be in the bank's back-office centres, including those in Chennai, Bengaluru, Kuala Lumpur and Warsaw, according to Winters. "Of course we're using AI along the way and AI will be a huge facilitator and enabler of that," he added, referring to its ongoing revamp to automate more of its core banking system. StanChart said it would deliver over 15% return on tangible equity in 2028, more than three percentage points higher than in 2025, and building to about 18% in 2030. Meta also announced plans to reassign 7,000 employees into AI-related initiatives, just ahead of layoffs expected to affect roughly 8,000 workers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Standard Chartered plans to eliminate close to 8,000 support roles over the next four years, scaling practical uses of AI to streamline processes, and Meta Platforms is reassigning 7,000 workers to new jobs related to AI. Tom Metcalf has more on "Bloomberg Open Interest." (Source: Bloomberg)

London-headquartered bank said it would cut corporate functions roles by more than 15 per cent by 2030 and scale practical uses of AI to streamline processes