Tech evolution will mean more job cuts at Standard Chartered, but staff will be reskilled: CEO

SINGAPORE: Some jobs at Standard Chartered – especially in more manual areas such as technology and operations – will “go away” as the Asia-focused lender continues to cut costs and automate its processes, the bank’s CEO Bill Winters told CNA on Thursday (Apr 4).

However, he stressed that affected employees will be given the option to take up other roles within StanChart, and that its headcount in Singapore has been “stable”.

“(Our) transformation is about investing in technology to continually improve our business, and hopefully producing better outcomes for clients,” he added.

“People will absolutely be displaced, but we’re being thoughtful about it and doing everything we can to retrain and reskill along the way.”

Mr Winters, who has helmed the British lender for nearly nine years, was speaking to CNA in a wide-ranging interview on topics including layoffs, its hefty losses in China, forecasts for interest rate cuts by the US Federal Reserve, and Dubai becoming StanChart’s third-biggest market after Singapore and Hong Kong.

StanChart earns most of its profits in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

LAYOFFS

In June last year, Bloomberg News reported that StanChart was starting to lay off employees across Singapore, Hong Kong and London as part of an existing plan to slash costs by more than US$1 billion from 2022 to 2024.

According to Bloomberg, the bank trimmed roles in middle-office functions, including human resources and digital transformation in Asia. A StanChart spokesperson said it was “part of normal business activity” to review its role requirements on an ongoing basis across the bank.

On Thursday, when asked if job roles at StanChart would need to transform given the bank’s investment in technology, Mr Winters answered: “Yeah, for sure.”

He noted how the nature of banks has evolved in the 40 years that he has been in the industry, with people being displaced and new jobs being created.

Despite this, he said headcount at StanChart has remained “more or less the same” from when he joined the bank in 2015.

Voluntary attrition has stood at between 9 and 11 per cent per year, while performance-related attrition is at 1 or 2 per cent per year. Jobs lost at the bank stand at “probably 3 to 4 per cent” annually.

“That’s not because it’s the target. It’s because we’ve been investing at the same time that we’ve been contracting in other things. That’s the nature of our business, and will continue to be,” Mr Winters said.

“Will people be displaced? Yes.”

Addressing questions on how the job cuts have affected morale and operations, and where the layoffs came from, Mr Winters said that StanChart’s transformation programme was not about cost-cutting or job-cutting.

“We will take expenses out, but it’s going to be by simplifying our business by digitising everything that we do, and by automating everything that we do.

“So over periods of time, in particular in the technology and operations areas, there will be jobs that go away, then we can have lots of people who are doing manual tasks today that will be done by machines in the future,” Mr Winters added.

This will not happen overnight, he said, giving an example of replacing a loan processing system in Bangalore that will cut 20 jobs. The bank and staff will know this is happening “probably a year ahead of time”.

He said: “We’re reskilling them, we’re training them. We’re giving them every opportunity, especially in service centres – we have large service centres in Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore, Chennai.”