HSBC job losses to begin in weeks amid lender’s sweeping overhaul, high-level boss says

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The head of HSBC Holdings’ new global wholesale banking unit said the lender aims to wrap up its restructuring ‘very quickly’

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People pass an HSBC branch in Mong Kok on October 22, 2024. Photo: Nora Tam

Bloomberg

Published: 2:21pm, 8 Nov 2024Updated: 2:22pm, 8 Nov 2024

The head of HSBC Holdings’ new global wholesale banking division said the lender will seek to wrap up a restructuring process “very quickly” and could announce the first round of job cuts within weeks.

Michael Roberts, CEO of the British lender’s corporate and institutional banking and head of Western markets, told Bloomberg Television in an interview on Thursday that the job losses will be concentrated at the senior level. He said the restructuring, announced last month by new group CEO Georges Elhedery, will be done in a “thoughtful way”.

“We are very much aware that this is distracting, this is disruptive, so we are going to do this as quickly as possible,” Roberts told Bloomberg TV’s Manus Cranny. “I’m talking weeks before we announce the first level followed by several other weeks. We’re going to be working very, very quickly.”

He said there will be details on the total number of affected jobs around the time of HSBC’s full-year results. “By the time we get to February, not only are we going to have a number in place, we’re going to have an organisational structure in place,” he said.

Europe and Hong Kong’s largest bank has embarked on a sweeping overhaul that combines global commercial and institutional banking operations under Roberts and creates a new international wealth and premier banking business that will be overseen by Barry O’Byrne. The revamp has been presented as an answer to persistent investor concerns over how HSBC can survive and thrive in a world of falling interest rates where increasingly large regional competitors and growing ranks of fintechs keep chipping away at its customer base.

Roberts runs HSBC’s business in the US and Americas, having joined five years ago after more than three decades at Citigroup, most recently as its chief lending officer. He will relocate to London from New York in January as part of his new responsibility for rolling out the new wholesale banking model. The process to find a successor for his US role has started, he said.