Barclays to cut 5,000 jobs as it seeks to reduce costs with AI

Roughly 60pc of the reductions will come from within support functions, impacting developers and other professionals.

Bank and financial services company Barclays has announced it expects to cut 5,000 jobs, representing around 5pc of the bank’s total headcount. The layoffs are part of Barclay’s wider plan to cut costs using artificial intelligence. 

Reportedly, around 60pc of the reductions are coming from within Barclay’s support functions, with developers among those expected to be impacted. Of the 5,000 roles being eliminated, 1,000 were already cut in the first half of the year, with the remainder to go by the end of the year. 

“The changes that we’re making in the third and fourth quarters of this year are sizable,” Barclays’ chief financial officer Anna Cross told analysts in a call according to Bloomberg. “They relate both to the simplification of the organisation and to some of the impacts that we’re starting to see from AI.”

Barclays is nearing the culmination of a three-year strategy designed to improve performance, ramp up its technology and significantly cut costs. 

So far this year, the institution has spent around £600m as part of a wider plan to reduce future costs. Barclays has stated that it has a further £300m or so worth of savings planned for the final three months of the year.

Barclays Investment bank had a mixed third quarter in which revenue from fixed income and currency trading fell by nearly 20pc year-on-year to £1.01bn – less than what was expected by analysts. It was a better quarter in relation to equities revenue, which jumped 47pc.

It is a challenging landscape for jobseekers and professionals currently as there have been several high-profile job cuts announced so far in October, including, 1,000 people from eBay, 400 from EA and 1,000 employees from Netflix. 

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