Shares in Standard Chartered rose in the wake of the announcement – John Keeble/Getty Images
Standard Chartered is planning to cut thousands of jobs as artificial intelligence agents increasingly replace back-office staff in the finance sector.
The banking giant said overnight that the number of administrative roles at the company would be cut by at least 15pc by 2030, equivalent to nearly 8,000 jobs.
The company did not provide details on where it intends to cut the roles but it has significant back-office operations across India, China, Malaysia and Poland.
The bank employs around 82,000 people with roughly 52,000 in administrative roles. Some of those affected are set to be relocated to other parts of the business.
Bill Winters, the bank’s chief executive, said: “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.
“We don’t have job losses but we do have job role reductions in favour of the machines and that will accelerate as we go forward into AI.”
Shares in Standard Chartered rose by as much as 2.5pc in the wake of the announcement.
Standard Chartered is the latest bank to announce significant job cuts as AI technology advances.
HSBC is also preparing to cut around 20,000 roles, the equivalent of around 10pc of its total workforce.
John Waldron, the president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs, recently described his bank’s back-office and administrative roles as a “human assembly line” ripe for automation.
Morgan Stanley has predicted that more than 200,000 European banking jobs are under threat from AI over the next five years.
AI is already having a significant effect on the broader jobs market.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think tank, said recently that AI was part of the reason that just half of 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK were in payrolled work at the end of last year.
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, has warned that AI could eliminate up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs across fields such as law, finance and consulting, and lead to US unemployment rates rising to 20pc within the next few years.
The move by Standard Chartered is part of a fresh strategy by Mr Winters to improve profitability. The bank is seeking to raise its so-called income per employee by a fifth by 2028.
“We are investing in the capabilities that will compound our competitive advantages and drive sustainable growth and higher quality returns over time,” Mr Winters said.
In April, Standard Chartered said it set aside $190m (£142m) to hedge against the potential risks from the war in Iran but it maintained its guidance for the year.