Standard Chartered to axe 1000 senior management roles
(12 October 2015 – United Kingdom) Standard Chartered is axing one in four senior management jobs, or 1,000 roles, as its new boss seeks to reduce costs.
Bill Winters, who started as chief executive in June, announced the scale of his cuts in a memo to staff according to Reuters.
“Our situation requires decisive and immediate action,” Winters said.
“Each member of the management team has a mission to drive through improvements in our returns and part of this will be further streamlining of our organisation.”
Winters was recruited to Standard Chartered, a familiar sight on high streets in emerging markets, to bolster returns to shareholders after three profit warnings in quick succession dented its share price. He took over from Peter Sands, who had led the bank through the 2008 financial crisis.
He had indicated cuts were on the way when presenting the bank’s first-half results in August. At the time Winters was careful not to put a figure on job cuts after 4,000 roles – or 5% of the workforce – had been cut in the previous six months.
Standard Chartered said the latest memo was following through on Winters’ warning that the bank needed to “kickstart performance, reduce costs, slash bureaucracy, improve accountability and speed up our decision making”.
“Bill’s note to staff is an update on what we said we were going to do. In it, he has made it clear that kickstarting performance is a priority, and we are not standing still. We have a clear sense of our direction of travel and the key areas of focus – superior execution, targeted investments, divestment where we are not advantaged and innovation in our product and process design,” a Standard Chartered spokesperson told Reuters.
“On headcount, we said previously … that there would be further personnel changes to come, as we simplify our organisational structure. We have already acted to reduce management layers, and a result will have up to 25 percent fewer senior staff.”
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