Tuesday 19 May 2026 11:00 am
| Updated:
Tuesday 19 May 2026 11:01 am
Winters insisted the move was not a conventional cost-cutting exercise
Standard Chartered has announced plans to slash almost 8,000 back-office roles, as Britain’s labour market continues to show signs of strain.The London-headquartered lender said it would reduce over 15 per cent of its support functions by 2030, equivalent to around 7,800 jobs, as boss Bill Winters pushed through a new strategy aimed at lifting profitability and increasing income per employee.The cuts come as UK unemployment hits five per cent, according to fresh labour market figures, whilst vacancies have fallen to their lowest level in five years.Meanwhile, payroll numbers dropped by 100,000 in April, fuelling concerns that firms are not merely slowing hiring but beginning to shed staff more aggressively. Winters insisted the move was not a conventional cost-cutting exercise: “It’s not cost cutting: it’s replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital with the financial capital and investment capital we’re putting in.” The FTSE banking giant said it was “scaling practical uses of automation, advanced analytics and AI to streamline processes, improve decision-making and enhance both client service and internal efficiency”.The cuts are expected to fall across corporate functions including human resources, risk and compliance.The bank did not give a UK breakdown, with affected operations understood to include major back-office centres in India, China, Malaysia and Poland.Job cuts collide with rise in UK unemploymentThe latest labour market figures have given the Standard Chartered announcement a sharper edge.The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said vacancies fell by 28,000 to 705,000 between February and April, while unemployment rose to five per cent in the three months to March.Liz McKeown, the ONS director of economic statistics, said lower-paying sectors such as hospitality and retail had seen “some of the largest falls in vacancies and payroll numbers”.Elsewhere, Sanjay Raja, chief UK economist at Deutsche Bank, said the figures would “stop the MPC in its tracks”, with unemployment higher than expected and payrolls suffering what he described as a “mammoth fall”.Standard Chartered is not alone, with DBS having already warned of around 4,000 contract and temporary job cuts, while Meta, Amazon and Oracle have all announced large reductions in the past few months, as AI spending accelerates.Charles Radclyffe, the AI entrepreneur, has warned that “every time we bill [for a month’s AI work], that is a job from the economy gone and moved into a data centre”.
