Up to 20% Of Barclays Investment Bank Staff Will Lose Their Jobs

Barclays Bank Plc has had a torrid year as a number of forex violations have been highlighted both in the United States and the U.K that the bank has not denied. The bank has also been hit with a record number of fines in 2015 and will have to make provision for those fines to be paid in the coming months.

Barclays has decided to make a number of changes to its policies in order to cut costs and ensure that all fines are paid on time. The bank had earlier announced that it planned to cut nearly fourteen percent of its global employees and expected close to 19,000 employees to be made redundant during the next three years.

Barclays has now decided to make additional job cuts this time targeting the investment banking division. The bank has decided to cut an extra 20 percent of investment banking staff and stated that most of these job cuts will take place in Asia in markets such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. The investment banking division has already been on the hit list with over 7,000 jobs expected to be cut in 2016 and this additional cut will significantly reduce the overall operations of Barclay’s investment banking team which employed around 20,500 people in 2014.

Barclays had fired Antony Jenkins, its chief executive officer in July 2015 and decided to replace him with Jes Staley who started from the 1st of December. Staley will look into ways on how he can reduce the overall costs of the bank and increase its profitability but will also rely heavily on Barclays bank chairman John McFarlane who joined the team in April.

McFarlane has stated that he prefers Barclays to concentrate on markets in the United States and Great Britain and focus less on Asian market which did not bring in a lot of money for the bank.

The bank is currently reviewing the amount of revenue it generates from Asia and the Middle East. Barclays generated around £12.4 billion in Britain during 2014 and only £776 million from operations in the Asia-Pacific market, which was just 3 percent of its overall revenue.

Jes Staley had stated in October 2015 that Barclays would

complete the necessary transformation and repositioning of the investment bank to a less capital-intensive model

and ensure that the bank has a good relationship with regulators. The bank has experienced a 5.7 percent drop in its share prices during 2015.