Customers
waiting outside a retail branch of Barclays Bank for the bank to open
in London yesterday. Barclays has announced plans to cut at least 3,700
jobs in a major restructuring that follows a scandal-hit year for the UK
bank. Photo: AP SOURCE:AP
Antony Jenkins, Chief Executive Officer of Barclays Plc. Photo: Bloomberg
Customers
waiting outside a retail branch of Barclays Bank for the bank to open
in London yesterday. Barclays has announced plans to cut at least 3,700
jobs in a major restructuring that follows a scandal-hit year for the UK
bank. Photo: AP SOURCE:AP
Antony Jenkins, Chief Executive Officer of Barclays Plc. Photo: Bloomberg
Operations in Singapore to be affected by job cuts as new CEO sets out to rebuild bank
TODAY understands that the bank’s Singapore operations will be affected by the job cuts. It hires about 3,500 employees here.
The plans form part of an overhaul which Chief Executive Antony Jenkins hopes will convince a sceptical public that he can change a bank that has been dogged by controversy, including a US$450-million (S$559.5-million) fine for rigging Libor interbank lending rates.
The ensuing storm over the manipulation of the benchmark interest rates triggered the departure of its then Chief Executive, former Wall Street trader Bob Diamond, and Chairman Marcus Agius.
“I understand the cynics and the sceptics out there, but cynics and sceptics never built anything. It will take years before people actually change their impression of us. I’m not daunted by that at all,” Mr Jenkins told BBC radio.
Barclays said the job cuts will include 1,800 in corporate and investment banking and 1,900 in its European retail and business banking.
Finance Director Chris Lucas said 1,600 of the investment bank cuts had already been made.
Mr Jenkins plans to focus investment in Britain, the United States and Africa, and reduce the bank’s presence in continental Europe and Asia.
Nearly one in three Barclays branches in continental Europe, or over 340 offices, according to Reuters calculations, will be closed.
He will scale back the investment bank’s equities and advisory businesses in continental Europe and Asia and refocus its retail businesses in Italy, Spain, Portugal and France on mass affluent customers.
Mr Jenkins, 51, has said he expects his plan, dubbed Project Transform, to take five to 10 years to rebuild Barclays, and has told staff they should leave if they do not want to sign up to the new standards.
Mr Jenkins, previously a retail banker, was picked at the end of August to run the bank after Mr Diamond was forced to quit.
At a press conference, he attempted to distance the bank — which has become a focus for public anger at the excesses of the financial sector — from the aggressive, high-risk culture championed by his predecessor.
Pledging that Barclays would put ethics above earnings, he said: “Barclays is changing. There will be no going back to the old way of doing things. We get it, we are changing the way we do business, we are changing the type of business we do ... We must act at all times with good values.”
Keen to convince a sceptical public that Barclays can change, Mr Jenkins has cut the average bonus for its investment bankers, halted trading in soft commodities “for speculative purposes” and closed its structured capital markets division, which one lawmaker last week said advised clients on “industrial scale tax avoidance”.
Mr Jenkins said he had full confidence in his executive team but declined to answer questions about the future of Mr Rich Ricci, head of Barclays’ investment bank, where many of the scandals emanated.
“I can’t predict the future,” he said. REUTERS
- wong chee tat :)
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